Something important in the world of search engine optimization (SEO) happened in 2019. Google called it Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which few people can understand — so it’s BERT, for short. And it’s still a bit complicated. 

At its core, it’s all about Natural Language Processing (NLP), which means that Google has learned to anticipate the questions people ask. And in turn, this impacts keywords and SEO. You can see Google’s search engine machine learning at work when you start typing in a topic and several related options appear as phrases, suggested in anticipation of your question.   

Observers have said Google’s algorithm updates guarantee the end of key words as we once knew them.

Google experts said it was “the biggest leap forward in the past five years and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.” Both statements are true. 

There was a time not long ago when many content producers believed that keywords and phrases used repeatedly would assist Google Search and move a piece of content to a higher ranking. In fact, this practice is known as keyword stuffing, a spammy practice that it is penalized by Google and will actually harm a page’s ranking.

With more than 200 ranking factors, Google has sophisticated ways to evaluate, measure, and rank a site. These include metrics such as recency, relevancy, reputation, and more. In all cases, Google also looks for authenticity and this is reflected via human speech patterns with the natural use of keywords and key phrases that are never forced.   

Due to algorithm enhancements, Google now recognizes keywords and phrases that don’t read as natural speech, including when they’re placed in a list in an effort to increase the count. 

There are appropriate places for keywords to appear in a natural context:

• Page title
• Heading(s)
• Paragraph text only where it makes sense
• Title tag
• Meta description tag
• URL
• Website copy

Your objective: Avoid Google’s wrath! Don’t get dinged by Google for out-of-date website copy and content management practices. We can fix it for you. Just add Spritz to your website refresh plans and watch the Search results improve.     

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