How Keyword Proximity Affects Your Page Ranking

Keyword proximity is one of the many factors that affect search engine rankings.  A number of people get confused with concepts like keyword frequency, density, proximity and prominence.

Keyword density us the ratio of keywords in a page content against the total number of words that can be indexed within a page.  The preferred ratio would vary from one search engine to another.  It is generally recommended and accepted for the density ratio to fall between 2 and 8 percent of the total content.

Keyword frequency is the number of instances that a keyword phrase or keyword would appear within a page.  A well accepted theory is that the more frequent a keyword appears in a page, the more relevant a page gets to search engines in search results.

You can ensure that the most important phrases and keywords appear most frequently in your page.  You need to be conscious with the density if you observe high frequency as being too frequent might be taken by Google as a form of abuse or “stuffing” which can get your page penalized.

Keyword prominence is how to get keywords placed on a web page to be prominent.  Essentially, this means to place important keywords near or at the start of a sentence, page, TITLE or META tag.  On the other hand, keyword proximity is the closeness between multiple keywords.  Generally, it is better to place the keywords closer.

To illustrate this better, I should give you a sample content.  For instance, observe the proximity in this page text content example:

“Keyword Proximity Affects Your Page Ranking”

“Proximity of Keywords Affects Page Ranking”

Looking at the above example, imagine when someone searches for “keyword proximity”.  The first title would most likely get a better ranking than the second.  This is because the important keywords are placed closer, with the assumption that other elements are equal.

Keyword Proximity Can Make Or Break Your Ranking

Proximity of keywords in your site, among many other factors, can make or break all of your efforts in search engine optimization.  The results of effective proximity can be seen in search engine results.  If you intend to target a specific keyword phrase, you will find that there is a difference between your search and the same search with the use of “stop words”.

It is important that you avoid using any “stop words” or “filler words” between very important keywords on your website.  If you get to top search engine results for the non-broken phrases, it is more likely for you to top a search engine for broken phrases too.  This is more likely than its reverse.  Proximity needs to be used wisely as searched phrases and reversed phrases would yield very different search engine results.

Keyword Proximity And Other Considerations

There are a great number of proximity considerations, including how users would read a page.  For example, the top portion of a page is what tells the audience what it is all about.  This tells you to observe higher proximity of keywords and keyword phrases at the top of your page.

This principle also indicates that you need to observe high keyword proximity at the page title.  You can consider other factors like description tag, heading tags, alternate text, input tags, and the very first sentence which follows the H1 tag.