SEO – Keywords Need Context

Basic SEO teaches you to establish a list of highly relevant keywords to include into both your meta-data and your body copy. It’s crucial that you have your keywords present so that Google and other search engines can relate key search terms to your website. But if that’s the case, why don’t you just stuff all your keywords at the top of the page?

Keyword stuffing is an age-old ‘black hat’ form of SEO. Before Google became savvy to it. Simply listing your keywords on your website would have resulted in getting top rankings on search engines. But that’s not the case anymore. Keywords are still vitally important to your search rankings, but they need to be presented in coherent sentences and with context.

Here are the 2 main reasons why your keywords need context:

1. Google will penalise you otherwise

All search engines have a ‘black list’, and if you are not producing copy that makes sense Google will block your site from appearing in its search results. It’s the SEO equivalent of spam, and Google are on top of it. You copy needs to have context and relate to the subject of your pages if it is to get noticed by Google and not blocked by them.

2. Your users need to understand you

It is all very well keyword stuffing to get users attention, but if they can not relate that to the copy they are presented on your site then they will not buy from you anyway! It’s a pointless task getting people on your site if they leave it straight away. Users need copy with context.