How Important is Keyword in SEO

Somebody talked about SEO Beginners Guide: SEO Meta Keywords

My dear my dear if you are an SEO and you are talking about Meta keywords you are so mistaken. Meta keywords are almost irrelevant from search engine optimization point of view. There is keyword and there is Search Engine Optimization.

Suppose you say that when you type “how to grow pink and blue tulips”, into whatever search engine you happened to be using. That search engine like Google for example, would search for articles on the web containing those exact keywords. Those articles would show up on the first page of Google’s results." Hang on.

This is absolutely not true. SERP doesn't work this way. Type apple when you mean fruit and what you get is Apple Inc.

There is title tag and meta tags, HTML tags and there is the use of images, alt tags, caption and description and very notably URL (always use custom URL to build your own in Hubpages and remove any adverb and preposition e.g. in, and, for, what, of, is) and then there is LSI and user engagement for a particular keyword that a user may type in any of search engine like Google, Bing, Yandex or Baidu.

When Google show a result, it considers many factors which include but is not limited to title, H1 tag, keyword density, keyword proximity and LSI. But above all it’s about original, relevant and share worthy content that is people want to link to your post when they are writing about the topic you've written about. And the time spent on that page without "Bouncing" is a vital Search Engine Ranking Performance (SERP) factor.

Keyword relevance is dependent upon many factors. If a people is typing apple and he is spending 10 minutes on the apple website visiting more than say 3 pages then Google or Bing will assume that keyword relevance of apple to apple website is more than keyword relevance of apple the fruit on Wikipedia.

What is searched and looked upon in as in talking about search algorithm is about quality of page. And how is it decided? No search engine does manual check for quality content its about time spent on a particular page after typing a keyword and visiting the page that search engine returns. If you include a picture gallery and a video that a user is viewing then your page is a quality content for a search engine. That is why it is always advisable to make your page more engaging. In PPC it is of utmost importance when it comes to quality score.

Keywords and “key phrases” are essential in your first paragraph. Ideally, they must appear in the beginning and within the forst 160 characters because that is what Google takes into account when it thinks of meta description for long tail keywords and mostly for Hubpages meta description snippet. But the end word is engagement and lesser bounce rate i.e. visitors are encouraged to visit more of your website and blog page. Hubpages Group feature is one such thing which you may use to optimize your page. Using images and videos and quizzes and polls are other ways of user engagement.

And Meta tag Keyword is worthless and most of the times inadvertently used to let your competitor know the keyword you are targeting your page with. I'd personally recommend not using Meta description tag or just using Page H1 and Homepage H1 for Meta keyword...2 is more than enough.

And captions, title and description is really very very important. Use them generously...longer the better. A trick to optimize your image is to name them as you will your ALT tag. Never name an image like img1.jpg if the picture represents Taj Mahal instead name it as taj-mahal.jpg

You see all in small letter or no space. It's good from SEO point of view.

Ah! I see I have gotten carried away.

But I do find SEO interesting :-)