Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How does Yoast SEO premium determine prominent keywords?
-
We are perplexed how Yoast determines which keywords to select on the page when ranking the top 5 prominent words in Insights. For example, we have a page where birthday parties is clearly the primary keyword. It is used an an H2, in body copy and tagged on images. Yet it does not show up at all. The term 20 Fiesta game points ranks #1. It is mentioned one time on the page in a bullet within one of 5-6 blocks. 40 Fiesta game points ranks 3rd and same situation. Waterpark ranks 4th and is mentioned twice on the page as a bullet of featured activities. But there ar 4-5 other attractions listed in the bullets higher? We have looked as tutorial videos and no one mentions how Yoast determines prominent keywords. Thanks in advance for steering us in the right direction.
-
exactly
it just dossn´t count the words in the page titles and meta descriptions, since they aint rly an part of the content. -
https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-insights/
It picks the prominent keywords based on density, the frequency the words are being used in the content.
-
Yoast does analyze every content on youre page to calculate the prominent words. But no it dosn´t count meta descriptions and titles (unless titles is youre headline). Since this content aint rly a part of youre "content".

Hope that was the answer youre looking for
-
None of Yoast's prominent words were in Header tags content ( H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), the title of the page, description or alt images. Only in page content and in all cases as a bullet point. Words that were in tags, titles, alt images and desciption were not included in prominent words. This is what is confusing, but thanks for taking the time to answer in any case.
-
Hi There,
Yoast determines the keywords that you are trying to rank by looking at the keyword prominence on the page. By the means of keyword prominence it would look into the following SEO factors:
- Header tags content ( H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), the title of the page, description, alt images and the main content of the page.
It would try to analyze and assess what you are trying to showcase to the world and to search engines using above factors. If your website doesn't have the right content at right places, it won't show up on the prominent keywords list.
I hope this helps, let me know if you have further queries.
Regards,
Vijay
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
AJAX requests and implication for SEO
Hi, I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face: When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page. We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1 -
Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold: (1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now? (2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after? Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney1 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0