{"id":643,"date":"2021-02-11T06:37:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T06:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spritzsf.com\/spritzbits\/?p=643"},"modified":"2021-02-15T11:28:59","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T11:28:59","slug":"did-google-kill-key-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spritzsf.com\/spritzbits\/did-google-kill-key-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Google Kill Key Words?"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEO and the Evolution of Authentic Content Writing<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Something important in the world of search engine optimization (SEO) happened in 2019. Google called it <\/span>Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which few people can understand \u2014 so it\u2019s BERT, for short. And it\u2019s still a bit complicated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At its core, it\u2019s all about Natural Language Processing (NLP)<\/a>, which means that Google has learned to anticipate the questions people ask. And in turn, this impacts keywords and SEO. You can see Google\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Observers have said Google\u2019s algorithm updates guarantee the end of key words as we once knew them.<\/p>\n

Google experts said it was \u201cthe biggest leap forward in the past five years and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.\u201d Both statements are true.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s ranking.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Due to algorithm enhancements, Google now recognizes keywords and phrases that don\u2019t read as natural speech, including when they\u2019re placed in a list in an effort to increase the count.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are appropriate places for keywords to appear in a natural context:<\/strong><\/h3>\n