It’s time to take another look at how your site is being ranked

How long have you been involved in internet marketing? If it’s been more than, say, five minutes you will no doubt have heard or read someone tell you just how important keywords are. Without them, as the legends say, you are guaranteed to fail in a dramatic manner. You’ll never be taken seriously by the search engines, clients will never find your work and you’ll be wasting time and money like no other!

This might all sound rather scary – and if it does, it might please you to know that there is no such thing to be worried about. It’s a lot of nonsense that is built around the theorem that search engine optimization (SEO) still works the same as it used to. In 2013 and 2014, SEO went through a metamorphosis and, finally, moved away from the keyword-heavy burden that it always carried around its neck until now.

Keywords allowed people with no real knowledge or anything interesting to say on their pages to dominate the search engines. It made a bland and grey text that was only lit up by over-the-top sales pitches hit the top rankings for big keywords, and it was slowly killing off the essence of why SEO existed in the first place – so that quality could be rewarded.

Thanks to the numerous updates that we’ve seen since, though, this is now beginning to become the future. Keywords are still important, as it gives the search engines something to grasp about the topic you are writing about, but the density is no longer something you need to worry about. This is good news for both writers and webpage owners.

You no longer need to instruct your writers to build content around X uses of Y keywords, and writers can now concentrate on being interesting and giving out helpful information rather than cramming in keywords to try and make the piece fit the SEO requirements of their colleagues.

Use engaging and unique content

Keyword density has, much like Meta keywords, become a bit of a thing of the past. If you are still building all of your content around the right Meta keywords and keyword usage, rather than naturally flowing content that reads like an actual piece of writing and not a computer algorithm’s dream, then you are missing out. This is the simplest way to start bringing more traffic to your website.

Old content is something that we want to revamp if it was built on keyword density. There’s no point in doing this anymore as it will just hamper your chances of success – change the tune and start writing engaging and unique content that you can rely upon to hit the right targets with the search engines.