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Keyword proximity refers to the distance in space, as measured in within the keywords as well as the phrases including the keywords without repetition and with contextual relevance.

Keyword proximity measures the closeness between two keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For Search Engine Optimization, the proximity of the keywords or keywords included in a phrase in relation to each other and one another is of great importance and is the basis of using the appropriate combination of the words in the page titles,headers,paragraphs and page content.

Keyword proximity
by Mark Aaron Murnahan, CEO
YourNew.com / SnappyISP

Keyword proximity and the keyword density within your Website can make or break your search engine optimization efforts. In this edition of Mail @ YourNew.com, I will try to help you better analyze keyword usage and improve your search engine relevance.

The results of keyword proximity may be seen by taking a moment to perform a search in your favorite search engine. If you target a keyword phrase, you will often find that the difference between your keyword search and the same search using “stop words” (e.g. in, and, we, and of course, your company name or Website address) are vastly different. You should avoid “filler words” or “stop words” between important keywords. This is because if you can top the search engine results for non-broken phrases, you will be more likely to top a search engine for the broken search phrase as well. This is to say, far more likely than the reverse. Also, the logical search and the keyword phrase reversed (e.g. widgets Kansas vs. Kansas widgets) return much different results. Therefore, proximity should be used wisely.

Keyword proximity considerations should include the proximity of keyword or keyword phrases to other keyword occurrences within the page, as well as the top of the page. After all, the top of the page usually tells you what you are there to read about.

This obviously begins with the page title. Thereafter, you should consider the description tag, alternate text, heading tags, input tags, and the first sentence following the h1 tag. The order mentioned here is only because this is a common order seen in the HTML code, and not based on the level of importance.

Page Title: If you thought that a page title like “Web design and hosting” is a good page title, then you will obviously have a hard time competing against a Website titled “Web Design Web Hosting”. When you use “stop words” (words with no value and which search engines do not index), or your company name in your title, you throw your search engine traffic to the wind.

A properly formatted page will have the same keywords, in the same and varying keyword proximity, within the Web page title, description, first h1 tag, within the first sentence, and revisited within the overall page text. Additionally, a perfect page would have inbound, and outbound links with the keywords in the anchor text, and the anchor titles, and subsequent heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etcetera). Always be mindful that heading tags should reflect the overall page flow, and never be used improperly.

Some of the above deals with keyword usage, keyword density, and keyword placement, which I will address in future editions of Mail @ YourNew.com. For now, we are looking at the proximity of keywords.

Keyword Proximity Explained

An example of effective use of keyword proximity is to use your prominent keyword or keyword phrase in both forward and reverse proximity.

If I write about an Internet service provider specializing in accelerated dial-up Internet access, I will first consider the keywords I am targeting for the specific page. If I determined that the target keyword phrase is “accelerated dial-up“, I will want to use keyword proximity such as the following:

Page Title: Accelerated Dial-Up

Description: Accelerated dial-up: Surf faster with dial-up accelerated to 5x the speed.

Heading: Accelerated Dial-Up

Sample Sentence: SnappyISP Internet Service offers server-compressed accelerated dial-up service. Dial-up acceleration service provides up to five times the download speed of Web pages compared to standard dial-up Internet service.

In the instance above, I have used keyword proximity to display the keyword phrase as both “accelerated dial-up” and ” dial-up acceleration” and repeated it throughout prominent places within the page.

Please note that the keywords are used in both directions (e.g. accelerated dial-up and dial-up acceleration). It often takes a careful eye to detect proper keyword proximity usage, but search engines see everything.

As a side-note, some people think that they should hide keywords. I am not ashamed or afraid to tell you of hundreds of keywords I hold at the top of very competitive search engine results. The way I look at this is if you want to compete with me, I welcome your challenge. After all, I compete with millions of competitors on a daily basis. Hiding keywords is another upcoming article where I will dispel some myths, so keep reading!

As I have discussed in previous articles on keyword usage, and how to never cheat a search engine, you should not become overzealous with any tips that I offer. At the same time, if you have a page about a specific topic, you should make it clear why a reader is there, and why a search engine should index your page.