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Does Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Significance Provide Value?
By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
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A couple of days ago I posted, Google Webmaster Tools Now Has Keyword Significance. It was about how Google’s Webmaster Tool is now displaying a chart titled Keyword Significance. After I posted it, I received three comments, and just as many emails suggesting that it’s not clear what Keyword Significance is about.
Google’s Explanation of Keyword Significance
Here is what Google says the keyword significance list is for:
Below are the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.
Google is basically looking at your website, sorting its content by the number of times each word was used, and revealing to you what keywords you use the most. It’s similar to a tag cloud, but instead of being all crazy looking like a cloud it just nicely organized.
If you click on any of the keywords they provide you, they indicate the number of times they were found, and where they found those keywords on your site. This can be very helpful if you are playing the keyword density game, but more importantly knowing how your site is seen by Google can sometimes be very enlightening.
Using Keyword Significance in an Example
Using this site as an example I found that the sixth most used word was “Post”. This website isn’t about a post or posts. Doing some quick on site research revealed, I often referenced other posts on the site with terms like next post, previous post, or popular post. Eliminating the unnecessary uses of the word will improve the way Google sees my site. Keyword density for more important words will now also rise up more. Now I just need to delete all those articles I wrote about on how to paint a white fence post.
Digging into the help that Google gives about Keyword significance, they mention two other reasons to check it often. Finding terms like Viagra as a top five term on a site about pianos for example, might indicate that someone has hacked your site.
Google also suggest making sure that the terms you expect to find are indeed there. If they are not, it means that it’s possible Google is not able to access your page or pages. If this is the case they then they suggest checking your Webmaster Tools for website crawl errors.
Understand Keyword Significance now? Has anyone found some unexpected results? Share it by commenting below!
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I’ve found if I’m running paid search and the keyword signifgance is low (which really is just a density counter with maybe a few other things thrown in) then the quality score I recieve for my ad on that keyword is low.
Personally, I don’t think it’s the most helpful tool in the Google tool bag.
And a little off the topic, but you may enjoy this article from Website Magazine that reviews usability tools http://bit.ly/32mqlQ
I am affiliated with http://www.usertesting.com but the article covers many other tools as well.
Amanda
seems like it’s picking up non-keywords
Finding non-keywords seems to be it best benefit. Time for you to start removing them:)
Its just useless.. even i dont get whats the benefit of it?
oh, Google Webmaster tools is very late in its reporting… I don’t use it anyore
Slow to update is for certain. I think they are working a little harder though lately in trying to improve it. I foresee it merging with Google AdPlanner somehow.
Google AdPlanner is new for me… think its time to go back and see Google’s tools..
BTW, you’ve got a nice site. I already boomarked and posted in twitter..
Cool! Thank you.
to me it seems pretty useless… but I generally like google’s tools and use them quite often.
Note that Google will also weight keywords with more significance if they are internally linked. I.e., the word “post” is probably high on your keyword list because it’s linked in your navigation or in your anchor text.
So, if you are looking to alter the your keyword significance, take a good look at your linked text and make changes where appropriate.
Great advice!
It’s just useless!