Yesterday's post sparked quite an exciting discussion and many of you added to the conversation with SEO insights of your own. That's one of the best things about AR. It's a place where we learn from each other.

Today, I want to touch on two other keyword-related matters: The use of keywords in body text and in the permalink, once again borrowing insights from the Search Engine Ranking Factors report.

Body Text
There was a bit of back-and-forth between the experts on this issue, but I think the general consensus is that use of keywords in the body text is advantageous, especially when you repeat the same keywords used in the title. That's what I've always suggested, so long as the usage is not overbroad, and doesn't interrupt the natural flow of the language.

Let me add a word about something called Latent Semantic Indexing, which Google has been using for quite some time. Google doesn't just look at the keywords used in a particular blog post to assess what your site is about (it's proposition), but looks at the site as a whole. In other words, it's a matter of context. Not merely the keywords, but the words around the keywords. Not merely a given document, but the site in its entirety. Whew, sounds complicated! It's not. (You'll see why I say that in a minute.)

This commentary from SEO expert Aaron Wall (who is one of the participants in the search engine ranking report) may explain things a little better than I...

"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent."

I know, it's a bit wordy. But, here's the thing. Using a blog, you don't really have to fret too much over this stuff. Because your blog is going to be thematically-relevant (i.e., you're going to be writing about the same things over and over again), and because you are going to think in terms of using relevant keywords, and because you're going to be writing on a somewhat regular basis, and because blogs are incredibly easy for search engines to crawl, this is not an overwhelming issue. Believe me, it isn't. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Permalink
Much ado has been made over whether the use of your blog post title in the post URL (permalink) is relevant. Some swear by it; others not so much. The report participants had this to say...

"Works very well in Yahoo. Great for user navigation and still worth while to do as a basic SEO methodology. Use hyphens."

"Importance is mainly due to the keyword in links when people use the URL as anchor text."

"It certainly doesn't hurt, and provides bolded listings on many search results which assists clickthrough rates. It is good practice, but likely only has marginal value by itself."

OK, so the value may be marginal, but I agree with the last comment, it couldn't hurt. Since most all blog platforms either do this by default or, in the case of WordPress, gives you that option, I say choose it. You'll notice Active Rain does it as well, but tends to truncate the title.

Next Post
The next post is going to move away from keywords specifically, but talk about an issue some of you raised, that of the anchor text.