Targeting keywords on your website is pretty important, it tells search engines (Google) what your site is all about but targeting keywords alone will not rank your site higher in Google. In-fact if you stuff targeted keywords and phrases all over a single page without careful consideration for actual human consumption then it could actually damage your ranking. Your content should be readable and make sense to your readers. It’s also pretty useless having well written, keyword rich text on your site without an offsite strategy.
Offsite? What’s that?
You might not have an offsite strategy in mind but if your content is good and readers want to link to it or reference your content via a link on their own site, bookmark it for later reading or share it via social networks – in-fact anything that happens off your site that gives you a back-link, that is offsite happening right there. Which is another very good reason to make your content readable, if it doesn’t make sense then why would anyone link, bookmark or share it!
There is a debate about who or what is being shared and how frequency and volume is becoming too much to actually consume at the moment and in some cases this can be true, personally I think using sharing functionality on your website is still a good thing – if your content is good then let people share it if they want to. Sharing content throughout the web exposes your content to readers that you might not otherwise reach.
Search engines are putting more and more emphasis on social signals by listening to what is being shared, who’s social profile the content is linked to and what sites are linked to by those profiles, so having good content that is sharable is still a good idea as long as content writers have their house in order. By this I mean having their social profiles in good shape with up to date bio’s, the correct author meta, canonical meta and all the techie stuff like that up together.
To conclude my point here that keywords do not make your website rank highly lets just reiterate what I mean. In short, make your content readable and make sense for human consumption, allow your readers to share your content to a wider audience and keep your social profiles up to date and connected to your websites. Feel free to leave your comments below.