How important is exact keyword match in content for SEO in 2018?
-
Is it necessary to have the exact keyword which you are trying to rank for within the first sentence of the content on your web page? For example if we are selling men's shoes, is it ok to have have the meta title and h1 on page say men's shoes and just talk about shoes within the first sentence of the content on the page. Is it obvious to search engines that this page is selling men's shoes even if you don't have the word men's shoes in that first sentence or is it necessary to have the exact keywords which you are trying to rank for written there?
-
Personally, I include the main keyword within the Title Tag and the H1 tag. I've also noticed ranking increases or decreases whenever I remove my target keyword from the title tag too so as a rule of thumb I include my core keyword in the title and H1 tag. I also work it into the main body content of the page I'm working on. If the page is relevant and on topic then it shouldn't be difficult to work your target keyword into your body content in a natural way.
But the important thing to remember is to write in a way that is natural for the end user.
I hope that helps some!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tools to created embedded content...
Wondering if anyone has done this before,, this so, would they mind sharing the best approach please. To cut a long story short, one of our seo client is a free UK internet safety resource, backed by (but independent from the UK Govt), the site is heavily talked about by sites such as BBC, Guardian and many more newspapers and as a result the domain authority is creeping up to 90 - Oh to be given the chance to monetise a site with DA 90!!! As you can imagine, with the quality of the links the site picks up, the ranking of content on the site can be fairly easy, but the one problem we are facing is that of sites 'borrowing' our content. These sites tend not to be small bedroom bloggers, but rather all kinds of sites. We have seen our content on UK University websites, Police websites and many more whom should know better. Obviously this is hurting the 'borrower' more than us with regard to duplicate content but it would still be good to get some credit for our work without having to keep hunting the sites down and emailing back and forth. We don't need the credit for backlink purposes but would be nice to have people know we read it incase they want to read more. A solution I have pondered is to create embed options, as per youtube et al. Instead of sites having to copy our content to list it, they can still include our content on their site and avoid any duplicate content issues. As I believe the embedded content will be called from our site (I think that's how a youtube video works) our site would also get the read stats on the content regardless of where is it located. We are hoping that this could become a great content distribution tool, we don't need people to come to our site as the site is non profit, has no advertising but we need to justify the resources we get by showing how many people are reading what we publish. We are never going to be able to stop sites using our content so, like the music industry and itunes, if we can find a legal way to do it then we can all benefit. My main question, yes, I do actually have one!!!, is two fold. Is it possible to create embed for whole articles and am i right in my thinking that if our content is on Jeff's Blog and loaded as an embed then the hit on the content is still reflected in our stats as the content is being pulled from our url? Sorry for the excessively long way of explaining this, any feedback is welcomed, even 'don't do it, it's stupid idea'!!
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
What is your strategy in looking for content to write relative to your niche?
looking to keep adding to our blog in a big way. Things I use are questions we get a lot, we add them to blog and answer them - works quite nicely. Look at other blogs although in our industry its not really there, etc. What are some of your strategies for looking for content to write about?
Content Development | | PaulDylan1 -
How to optimize content pages with ecommerce?
Some content pages act as buyers guides for certain products for example Used Paddle Boards for Sale - http://www.islesurfboards.com/used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx this is a content page that gets huge amount of traffic and is pure content with no products on the page, but we also have a ecommerce section of the site that is Used Paddle Boards for Sale -http://www.islesurfboards.com/buy-used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx however this page just has a small paragraph and all the ecommerce product related to this section on the page. The content only page above gets all the traffic and rank and then they click over to the actual ecomm section wiht the products from a link on that page. Should i merge these two together so its just one page and put the content on the ecom page? If i do all the content with push the ecommerce products down which is not good so what does anyone recommend as a best practice? Also will this mess up the content pages rank is i merge them assuming i redirect? or Keep them seperate like i have with a content page regarding "used paddle boards for sale" and an ecommerce page that sells acutal "used paddle boards for sale"
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
Is framed content on another domain duplicate content?
I've read a number of articles and am getting opposing answers. I've been checking pages of Photo.net in copyscape for duplicate content. I'm finding a number of domains have the site iframed onto them. I was wondering why copyscape could read the content if the search engines supposedly didn't crawl iframes. Copyscape said Google can read the content. I just want to know if these sites need to remove the iframe (is it hurting Photo.net)? Thanks. Examples: http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fphoto.net%2Freviews%2F
Content Development | | cakelady0 -
Do comments count as page content, as it relates to the length of content on a page?
I understand Google likes long content, and I make all my pages at least 500 words of unique and good content. But there is something I am curious about. Do they also count comments as content? The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering creating a Q&A site, where I'd control the questions, making sure they would be good ones and not duplicates, and then have people add answers. In reality, I'd be populating most the questions as first, and most definitely supplying a very good and long answer to questions. The answers would likely be in the form of comments, with highest ranked answers at top. So, I'm wondering what Google would think of a 100 word question, with a several hundred word answer in a comment, often followed by some other comments after that. Would it be a 100 word page or a 500+ word page?
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Duplicate Content Penalty
If our pages are to have roughly 30% of non-original textual content, can we be penalized by Google? Or are we OK as long as this non-original content is relevant to the pages?
Content Development | | Quidsi0 -
New Content
I am looking to add new content to pages that I currently have on my website. The content on these pages was taken from another provider and my idea is to rewrite the content to make it unique. Because it is duplicate content, these pages don't get much traffic. Should I add the new content to brand new urls or just change the content on these (already indexed urls). The issue has seen these pages contain duplicate content. If the content simply changes, will it recognise these pages as having unique content?
Content Development | | MattBB121