Who chooses your keywords?

This is a very short blog to reinforce a point that Dom made in a reply to me not long ago. We were discussing my "accidental" ranking for a keyword I hadn't chosen, and I'm shamelessly nicking his reply, which was, "Google chooses your keywords".

Whaaaaaaaat!

We've all gone through copious training on keyword selection, including finding low hanging fruit and long tail keywords or key-phrases. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you've missed the most essential training, so hit the green button on the left and PAY ATTENTION! Ignore me shouting - sometimes I frighten myself.

Don't worry, none of this training has been in vain. But Dom's right. We play Google's game by choosing phrases we know through our training that a number of people will type in when searching for our service or product. But the real work is done by Google's algorithm, Hummingbird, and its Latent Semantic Indexing. Because Google really seems to know what people want when they search, they will index all of your content, and yes, they'll sometimes rank you for words you haven't consciously chosen!

But whatever you do, choose decent key-phrases to help Google kick you off.

It's all part of Google's drive to reward well-written websites by pushing them in front of the poorer sites and getting them noticed. This means that a searching reader will get the very best answer to his or her question without digging too hard.

My reason for posting this is simple: I have a personal mission to bring home a message that Kyle, Carson, Rich, Dom, Beverley (BIS) and others have been banging on about before I got here - that success lies in the writing. It's my only real niche, and my only real area of "expertise" if it can be called that, but it's also my major passion.

you'll probably notice that I've made the point before. But people get the message in different ways, so I'm going for coverage here... humour me.

Some of you will feel that your own writing lacks something. There is a number of articles on writing and writing for the web on here. Just type your question into the "What are you looking for" box at the top of nearly every page and they'll come up. If you have a specific point to make then do it here; if you have a question, ask it here or PM me, and I'll help if I can. Just remember, if you can speak, you can write. If you can't speak naturally and type, then use the voice recorder on your smartphone, say what you have to say, and play it back like a dictaphone while you type. You can even include all the "umm"s and "err"s if you want.

Er.. I do.