Michael Martinez: Not as important as some people make it out to be.
Wikipedia has published millions of articles without regard for keywords. It does pretty well despite the lack of intentional, targeted optimization.
Marina Dolcic: Michael Martinez wikipedia has a ton of backlinks
Michael Martinez: Marina Dolcic Wikipedia also spreads PageRank back into the index through its "nofollowed" links. Google has managed PageRank that way for about 12 years.
It`s generally safe to test any theory against the performance of Wikipedia. If Wikipedia contradicts the theory then it`s not a good theory.
Perry Bernard: Note that Google now understands connections between keywords that don`t match in form at all, i.e. Google knows that `loan` is connected to `borrow money`, or that `fiance` can actually be a misspelling of `finance` in the right context. Treat a page as if you are trying to communicate to a real live person, not a pre-2015 search engine.
Perry Bernard: It`s more important to assign the `concept` to the page, not the `keyword`. Google`s webmasters have confirmed that H1 and H2 have much less significance than they used to. If they see a big heading at the top of the page, they will assume that`s the heading, irrespective of it being in a H tag or not. There are many other considerations like that which have reduced importance of some on-page SEO features, but they are still good to implement as a solid best practice.
Kayla Block: So why do all the SEO plugins want the identical string (I`ve wondered this forever)
Does google really care
Perry Bernard: Kayla Block it’s a great question. It’s because the plugin maker can’t make their plugin anywhere near as smart as the search engines are now. They are very basic only. I have told my clients to ignore exact match scoring for years now.
Kayla Block: Perry Bernard that’s very helpful because sometimes it’s hard to write that way.
“Why is my dog aggressive†“When my dog is aggressive†Seems like they should both help “dog aggressive†and I’d be shocked if google is really using that in that way.
Perry Bernard: Kayla Block you are exactly right. That text would likely also work for “dogs can become aggressive when...†the exact order is much less useful. What matters is what I call the pivots: “dog†and “aggressiveâ€.
Perry Bernard: Kayla Block keep in mind though that if your article is trying to answer a user query like “why is my dog aggressive†then you really should say this in the title and heading of the article without rewording it.
Trey Collier: Google has been able to understand the relationship between a word and what the meaning of the word. Many people including Google call that an entity relationship. What should be baking your noodle now is that Google has moved far past entity understanding and is now getting a better understanding into the intent of the query and not just pick out keywords or pivot words. You are seeing more of this every single day. They certainly can serve up a different set of results depending on how you asked the question. Ex. Why is my dog......When my dog is..... will more than likely return different results and hopefully better results because they are starting to understand how we process and understand words as part of our language. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with using HTML correctly as intended to help speed up Google`s understanding of what your page what post is all about. But I certainly wouldn`t worry about getting a certain percentage of this word or certain percentage is that word into a certain h# tags or number of words on page or etc. Just write for the user and provide best possible information to answer their query and natural flowing words like you were talking to them in person.
Perry Bernard: Trey Collier this is where my degrees in linguistics come in handy. 😉
Perry Bernard: And baked noodles are bad for your health.
Trey Collier: Perry Bernard. Nice tool to have. I do not have that gift and must use spell Checkers and grammarly all the time
Perry Bernard: Trey Collier oh I can’t spell. I don’t have that degree.
Trey Collier: Perry Bernard to be honest I don`t even really know what Linguistics really is. At first I thought it was related to linguine. Thankfully dictionaries I can use
Perry Bernard: Trey Collier now search “morphological lexicology “ and discover what I was writing my thesis on.
Perry Bernard: Basically, I was studying google’s future when google was still all only exact match and a million links.
Trey Collier: Perry Bernard I`m sure that will be above my pay grade for sure
Trey Collier: Perry Bernard I think that future of Google`s that you were studying has arrived in its infancy..... like a two-year-old AI baby
Perry Bernard: Trey Collier I quit a perfectly good job in 2002 to pursue Linguistics for AI long before computing capacity was ready for it. 5 years of study.
Trey Collier: Perry Bernard that must have been a Kodak moment when you quit
How important is assigning keywords to pages, sorting meta data, H1, H2 tags, alt tags, keyword density within content etc nowadays? 
