Not necessary to have keywords in the page? Do you agree?

[PegCorwin]

I am being told by my SEO consultants that:

"According to present Google algorithm it is not necessary to have keywords in the page. What is more required is the content is relevant to the page and whether visitors will stay on that page or not. If visitors stay for a longer time in your site it add bonus to the ranking of the site. So I think it is not necessary to add key phrases in the content."

Do you agree?

[dmccarthy]

certainly seems that Google is heading in that direction. How far it has gone is open to debate. Check out last Fridays' Whiteboard on the very subject.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

I would still include keywords in title and meta - otherwise your CTR will decrease.

[PegCorwin]

I read that article on citations, but how could that apply to small local sites with little position in the search engines?

[AndyMacLean]

"Content is king" is the old saying in SEO and whilst content 'may' actually only be a prince or duke nowadays it is still very important unless your site is especially high authority.

If you dont include the keywords or variations of them that you wish to rank for you're going to struggle to rank for them. Logically if you dont have the word 'red widget' on the page you're unlikely to rank for it. If a page is about red widgets why would it not include the keyword 'red widget'? Again if your site is high authority then this isnt so applicable - www.cadbury.co.uk used to rank 1st for 'chocolate' and it didnt even have the word on the home page. How did they do it? Lots of links creating high authority and using chocolate anchor text.

There is however a not so fine line between including keywords in the content (including meta info, link text etc) and keyword stuffing. As Des in this thread mentions and as I just referred to 'meta info' under the umbrella of 'content' - if you dont have the keywords in your page title or meta description you're much less likely to get users to click on your search result as (most of the time) your page title & meta description is what is returned as your search result.

[PegCorwin]

Thanks.  I do include them.

[PegCorwin]

Good distinction between authority and non-authority sites.  Thanks for the advice.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sounds like your SEO consultant is taking a small fact and blowing it up to usefulness proportions.

Yes, while it is possible to rank for a given keyword without actually having the keyword on the page, the vast majority of the time the keyword - or a close variant - is found in several parts of the HTML. The most common place is the <title>tag, but other common locations include the body text, headers, alt image tags, meta descriptions and so on.</p> <p>Unless you have very good links pointing at your site that reference your keywords (either directly or possibly through co-citation) you face an uphill battle trying to rank for your given terms if you don't include the keyword in your content or other HTML elements.</p> <p>This is a highly studied concept. If you're interested in the raw data, you may want to check out SEOmoz's 2011 ranking factors:<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6"> http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6</a></p> <p>Or a more recent correlation study performed by the Open Algorythm. <a href="http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/">http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/</a></p> <p>Another area that may interest you is LDA, which stands for Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This refers to the relation of how certain keywords associated with one another are positively correlated with higher rankings. A company call Virante has created a couple of tools around this concept. You can find them <a href="http://ntopic.org/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.virante.org/seo-tools/lda-content-optimizer">here</a>.</p> <p>Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.</p></title>

[PegCorwin]

Thanks very much.  Appreciate your detailed and documented response.