Keyword Significance

[NaHoku]

I am seeing some very interesting changes in our non-branded keywords, and am curious to know how keyword significance in Google Webmaster Tools plays into ranking of a site.  Say for example we are a photography website selling photography supplies.  At one point our most significant word was Canon, but now it is photography.  Would that mean that we would start seeing a lot of non-branded keywords generating from Google like "camera strap", "camera lens hood", etc.  This is really good for us, but curious to know if the only reason we are seeing this is the shift in our keyword significance.  Any insight?  Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Maybe someone can confirm this, but I believe this is google looking at the content on your site, and telling you according to your content, what keywords are most significant.  And I believe this is measured by the number of times each word occurs, site-wide (if you click on each word in the list, it will give you the number of occurrences and the pages).  SO, one of two things could have happened in your case:

1. Your content changed significantly enough, that the number of occurrences of each word changed, thus shifting around the order.

2. Google indexed new pages that were previously not indexed, which tipped the scales enough in one direction or another, and this changed word occurrence as far as what Google was aware of.

As far as rankings, I don't think its as simple as "higher occurrence=higher ranking" - there are a lot of other factors that come into play with ranking.

So I would take this list as Google telling you "this is what we think you're saying your site is about".  If you're getting words in the top of the list that make you say "well, that's not really what my site is about", you may want to consider doing something to fix that.

-Dan

[NaHoku]

Thanks Dan.  Actually, it is exactly what our site is about, and we are getting ranked for all kinds of non-branded keywords.  Happy days!  I didn't think of the indexing possibility and tipping the scale.  I'd be interested to hear what else people say.  Thanks again!