SEO Tip of the Week: Thematic Consistency

SEO Tip Of the Week : Thematic Consistency

90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us tips on thematic consistency of texts on a website in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.

Key word rich text – it’s not so much how many words, but making sure the words on the page are in line with your theme- seen sites rank based on keywords in titles

Hi this is my SEO tip of the week – extended version!

There is a misconception that more text will help you rank better.

One site which had some nice links, but was a java driven site, so the only keywords visible to search engines were the 6 words in the title tag, ended up ranking for about 30 fairly competitive phrases. On the other hand I know of a really popular content site with probably 4,000 words on the home page i.e. large excerpts of blog posts on the homepage and it doesn’t rank at all, despite some superb ranking metrics (high Majesticseo trust flow) and not having a penalty.

And I’ve seen an affiliate site with 2,000 words on the home page, ranking really well for a very tight set of target phrases.

I put it down to ‘thematic’ density. i.e. it’s the focus of the content around a given subject that is most important, not the length of the content.

What the 6 word site and the 2,000 word site both had in common was very condensed subject matter. It’s easy enough to identify this. If you use a keyword density tool, you can quickly see the frequency of keywords on the page and from that you can get a sense of ‘thematic density’.

Of course Google has been working on ‘understanding’ words better and they are great at identifying things like reading age in text. They need to do this so they can make more sense of pages in order to get you the best search results possible. (This is what the Hummingbird update was about)

The upshot is that keyword stuffing and being ‘artificially’ focused on certain keywords is not a good idea.

If you care about long tail phrases, then it’s a case of creating more pages of content, each one around a tight set of subjects so the search engines can rank that page because the predominant subject will be about [whatever the page is about]

And finally, whether you go long form text or just a few words, it’s the thematic consistency and density that matters i.e. make it on topic and well written!