Are Your Keywords Outdated?
Internet use is growing rapidly around the world and one of the main uses is to find information. Blogs really took off when individuals with knowledge in a particular niche wrote informative posts on the topic – particularly ‘how to’ posts. The problem is, these posts are now outdated in more ways than one. The one I want to concentrate on today is the use of keywords – or more particularly, keyword phrases.
In the early days you could optimize your pages for one or two word keywords – for example, red widgets. Search trends evolved and the number of pages optimized for ‘red widgets’ grew. So we made subtle changes – for example, we starting optimizing for phrases such as ‘installing red widgets’. This developed into the ‘how to’ posts with pages optimized for ‘how to install red widgets’.
The time is rapidly approaching where ‘how to’ articles could be declared dead. You may wonder why. Users are still searching for information, that will never change. However, what will change, and what is changing, is the way users search and the way search engines handle these searches. Users are becoming more sophisticated and their searches are now taking on a personal tone – they are now using words such as ‘my’, ‘I’ and ‘our’.
Pages that start with ‘how to’, for example, ‘how to install a red widget’ are being left behind. Users will now use terms such as ‘how do I’, using the above example, ‘how do I install a red widget’. The phrase ‘install a red widget’ may have been sufficient to rank in the past, now it is trending towards the much longer phrase.
For blog and web site owners, this could be a small bonus. If you are stuck for content you can now dig out those old pages, bring them up to date and publish them with titles that match the modern keyword phrases. This will of course increase your content, bring it up to date to suit today’s conditions, and rank well for phrases that will, over time, increase in use.
The first place to start when looking at modern search trends is to look at your own use and the use of those around you, particularly if you have younger members in the family. Watch their search patterns, ask them to undertake searches, and follow their lead – they are after all the future users that you will be relying on.
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