This is where we talk about topics. A topic is better than a keyword.
I almost always ask a question like, “How could you improve your site to improve search?” And very often, people say, “I would come up with better keywords.” And I’ll say, did you learn nothing from this class?
Because here’s the point: search is no longer about keywords—it’s about topic analysis.
Topic analysis works by looking at all the words. So imagine I go to Wikipedia and pull all the major words related to Python the programming language, and all the major words related to python the snake. Then we take a random webpage and compare all the words on that page to both of those sets.
As it turns out, my page has absolutely nothing that even remotely sounds like “snake.” But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It’s not binary. It’s just that the content is much more about the programming language and much less about the snake. Because of that, programming language is going to rise to the top before anything snake‑related.
That’s how we identify the topic. We use all the words on the page to determine what it’s about. We don’t rely on a single keyword. If you have thousands of words, that’s exactly what the search engines are using—instead of saying, “Oh, we’ll just let you tell us what the keywords are.”
This is really just reinforcing—again—why people have such a hard time letting go of keywords.