Don’t be fooled by people trying to tell you that tracking SEO metrics based on keywords and keyword performance is obsolete.

Keywords and the traffic they produce are alive and well and depending on the position (above the fold or below the fold) and the percentage of traffic they receive is tangible to assess conversion and performance benchmarks.

Over 80% of consumers hot on the trail of a product or service have a higher propensity of clicking the top 3 search results when presented with the top 10 websites for their query. If a user has to scroll below the fold the click through numbers taper down to the remaining percentages.

However, depending on factors such as:

1) the competition for the phrase

2) the relevance to the searchers intent and

3) the emotional click-triggers from the snippet/description in the search result (and how sticky it is) impact who gets the click.

Obviously, the more keywords that encroach on a topic, the higher percentage for conversion you have from those topics, when each of the pages becomes buoyant after gaining some authority in search engines (typically 2-4 months).

In closing, here is a brief SEO keyword exercise you can use to spread your semantic net a bit wider to funnel and capture more broad and exact match traffic for your pages.

This phenomenon is based on keyword stemming and Pair phrase indexing. The translation here; the more related keywords you have on a page or that reference a page, the higher the relevance for the related keywords.

I have mentioned before that any word on the page is a keyword when combined with the right synergy of on page and off page factors.

So, you never know what may emerge from the vacuum when a query is executed and just how Google, Yahoo or MSN may extract content and keywords from 1 page, 3 pages 10 pages or more from your site to combine an aggregate relevance score for your website vs. your competition.

It is not always clear cut and dried as this (such as the chronology of content and sheer volume) to outrank your competition. However, if you are constantly producing quality content in quantity with this in mind, the likelihood of your site hitting hub status as a resource for search engines to share with their readers is only a matter of time.

Keyword stemming is the premise of topical content reaching critical mass and sending key indicators to search engines that the subject is thoroughly present and saturated within your website.

The more semantic derivatives that exist in your pages, the higher your relevance for the keywords or niche in question.

As an example, just think of Wikipedia and how they virtually rank for every imaginable keyword as a result of (a) their massive internal index of pages and (b) the way they structure their site and (c) the way they cross link to their own content using synonyms and exact match anchor text (the text in the link).

As a result, the topical pools of information they leave behind in the cloud (via cloud computing) drive traffic to related web pages based on this basic premise. We know from SEO that When a keyword is present on a page, the density, frequency and prominence all have an impact as well as how many related pages on the topic exist in your site.

What we are proposing is, since semantic phrases overlap and reinforce relevance, the idea is to use the additional keywords discovered from a thesaurus to shore up islands of content for search engines.

For example, by adding 15 new related keywords to a page that already has relevance for related keywords, the amount of broad match traffic you can attract is exponential.

Over time, new relationships form between pages and phrases to raise the bar for how your site fares in search engines.

Now, for the exercise

1 – pick a keyword you want to reinforce.

2 – use the search command site:website.com keyword in a Google search box to find the target page with the highest occurrence of the keyword (to serve as the preferred landing page since search engines already have opted for that page). In case you want to try it, we have created an SEO tool for this purpose.

3 – then open the thesaurus tool and type in the keyword to find alternative phrases

4 – from the pages below the first result from step 2 (the other 9 below the number 1 spot), edit the page and add or change content to include the new keywords from the thesaurus.

5- from those new / related keywords, link back to the preferred landing / target page.

6 – use this tactic to funnel more traffic, it works since search results often combine a word from the title, another keyword from the description, a word or two from the actual page when searching for the top 1000 websites for any given query.

This is like discovering traffic you never knew existing, since it was latent within your website from lack of expression. More synonyms mean traffic with a very specific intent can find you when they need it most (when executing a focused search).

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