Keyword Position Checker

About Keyword Position Checker

SEO is a very hot topic these days. No business attempting nay sort of online presence can afford to ignore this subtle yet complex science. While SEO has its detractors, claiming it to be a “necessary evil”, the reality is that the modern internet would absolutely not work without this technique being properly employed.

Consider an internet where any of several wordings of a search concept could not bring about a comprehensive list of related sites and information, theoretically listed in order of relevance at that. This would be the internet of old, where general scan search engines and archaic, exclusive web rings are the only way to be found by topical research. This was an internet that while novel at the time, was remarkably less useful and efficient compared to that of today.

The end of such primitive and impossible to navigate internet came only thanks to the way modern search engines work, and those can only work the way they do thanks to the principles of SEO. So, it’s pretty obvious, just from that, that SEO isn’t a necessary evil, it’s a fundamental necessity period.

SEO in turn, would be impossible to properly harness to its fullest potential without some innovative, special tools like a keyword position checker. This is one of a host of very simple but invaluable tools that, all working together in harmony, can make for a very powerful online presence of unimaginable potential.

To fully appreciate the importance and role of this tool, we must first look at precisely how SEO and search engines work in modern times, as well as a quick look at the basic science behind strings (digital lines of text).
Modern search engines’ recipe for success is remarkably simple but clever. Where previous search engines required websites to register for visibility, modern computing power available in data centers alongside the juggernaut that is a broadband connection have allowed a less passive approach to search engines accessing and serving their data.

Google, of course, is the most famous and successful of the modern search platforms, due in part to its being a pioneer in the concept. The way Google and engines like it have search results ready at a moment’s notice is pretty straight forward. Google’s data centers have massive, powerful arrays which crawl the internet looking for new things not previously logged. When it finds something, it logs the basic data pulled from the website (though not all the data in entirety). It will also then tangentially follow any links leading from one site to others, to more rapidly find other entries related to it.

While it’s unconfirmed by Google, the idea that new searches from users form the criteria for things these arrays look for is pretty solid and makes a lot of sense.

So, when searches are submitted, various combinations of words (or at times individual ones) become key words. Google of course keeps statistics on how often a specific key word combination is searched, and also tracks similar ones (alternate wordings and synonyms) as well. This information is very publicly visible, which allows businesses to know what people are looking for, and how they’re wording searches for things a business is offering.
This information is absolutely crucial to SEO. In fact, it’s the very crux of the science. Search results in Google and similar engines are prioritized and ranked by how relevant the content of a site is. The relevance of a result is determined by the presence and ordering of primary and secondary key words in the website’s data (both meta and website body alike). So, the basic trick behind SEO is to integrate key words that are relevant and make sense, into titles, text bodies and other visible bits of writing in a web page.

Where people wrongly think this is outright a shady tactic to use comes solely from “black hat” SEO which is done through a couple tactics nobody should be doing. The first is what’s known as “spinning” where a base template is created, and software (or sometimes spin writers) create many wording variations, with the key words injected in.

The other is oversaturation of key words, the text resulting from which is often nonsensical or at least not the most useful information in the world. These sorts of tactics are generally used to grind page views, to make ad revenue on less than forthright sites. It can also be used to lure in unsuspecting viewers who then become victims of various cyber crimes.

Thankfully, these “black hat” SEO tactics are increasingly rare both due to most SEO experts being honest people using a tool the way it’s intended, and due to companies like Google getting better at having their infrastructures spot such things and not reward them. These aren’t something to fear much nowadays, but knowing about them is helpful in understanding why people sometimes have a misguided view of the ethicality of SEO. Knowing why helps refute such views when they come up.
Now, understanding how search engines work, and in turn how SEO works to make sites as visible as needed within these engines … the importance of various key word statistical tools is beginning to become somewhat apparent. However, there are many different statistics and aspects to track regarding this, and after a fact, it would seem like position tracking wouldn’t have that much bearing on things.

Understanding a little bit of the theory behind computer text helps to clarify some of why this matters so much, alongside a little more understanding of how the search engines use the presence of key words to qualify relevance. It’s not all about context and percentage of key words used. This used to be true, but not anymore.

First, a line of text in a computer is called a “string”. Strings are literally just a linear collection of characters, of course. When computer programs parse this sort of data, one of the common things done is to sample parts of it based on a position inside the string, plus a length in characters for sample size.

Even when fancier parsing (such as regular expressions) is involved, the results are often tracked and identified both by their textual values and their positions in the strings whence they came. Well, obviously search engines, when qualifying website data, are among other things, parsing text and measuring various results of this to determine many different factors.

That in mind, part of the effort made by search engines to abate “black hat” SEO is to analyze how far apart the key words and secondaries are spaced from one another, and their relative distribution in the text being sampled. If they’re too cluttered, it tends to look bad. If they’re too sparse, it can also look bad.

This has made the craft of shaping SEO writing that works properly (while reading naturally) has grown more difficult thanks to the need to comply with these strict analyses. Where once, the rule of thumb was once within the first 100 words, and then once per few paragraphs (depending on text length and key word percentage required). While this often still works for average-length text, shorter or longer forms of text can look bad to Google, thanks to these modern algorithms being so sensitive.

The process of writing these would be very painful and time consuming without something like a keyword position checker. These basically look at what points in the text, the key words appear. Nicer ones can go as far as to then calculate how far apart they are, and match these to patterns for distribution intended to be accomplished or avoided.

This makes the process of ensuring that the distribution of key words in text is exactly what is needed to optimize the appeal to search engines.
This sort of tool has taken many forms in recent years, as well. There are freely-accessible browser-based tools which can scan pasted text for a writer. There are extensions for word processors that can do this as well (some even taking the form of macros easily installed and modified at will).

However, the real power of this tool is realized when it’s integrated into the bigger system through which the text is being processed. Either through the intermediary platform which moderates the exchange between writers and clients, or the submission fields to post the texts directly, a keyword position checker can prevent the text from going through if it’s not laid out the way it needs to be.
Well designed versions of this concept provide the extra basic data which enable the writers to correct problems rapidly, rather than having to sit and deduce what changes need made.

And that’s the other thing with SEO that’s so crucial. Time is of the essence always. Key words change all the time, and rankings fluctuate as a result. In order to appeal to the proper demographic at the proper time, key words need to be determined, material composed to match the layouts needed, and this all be visible to the engines within a very short period of time.

The real nuisance is that this window of time is getting narrower and narrower by the day anymore. Eventually, something will have to give with this, and when that happens, the algorithms for Google and its ilk will again change drastically.

When these algorithms change (which has happened many times before), chaos ensues which throws companies and writers for a serious loop. Tried and true best practices for composing the material have to change, which means writers can no longer go based on their “muscle memory” when composing stuff. 

Before the change, writers will have gotten used to basic scatter patterns for their key words, and won’t have to measure them very often. When the change happens and their instincts lie to them, using things like a keyword position checker can help them bounce back quickly and re-train themselves in the way they need to lay out articles.

Once more, the entire cycle restarts, until eventually the fluctuations and restrictions reach yet another critical mass and, well, lather, rinse and repeat as they say.
Like many tech writers have been saying in recent times, all of these little analytical tools are so much more powerful and important than they would ever seem like they could be. When it comes to a fickle and ever-fluctuating science and discipline like SEO, this goes triple if not more so.

Without such tools available, precise SEO practices would be too expensive and time consuming to maintain properly. This would result in most businesses abandoning the entire thing. SEO not being widely implemented would, as said earlier, result in the modern rapid, accurate model of web searches being pretty much impossible to do. A return to (or failure to ever evolve beyond) the old way of accessing digital information would not just make the internet so much less useful and intuitive than it is now, it would actually bring the globe to its knees.

Technology like this is fantastic, but it’s important to appreciate that once something powerful like this takes hold, dependency on it becomes so very integral to sustained operations. Keeping up to date on proficiency at using these technologies is therefore pretty much a life or death thing, professionally speaking.
That’s why paying attention to these small and yet surprisingly useful tools is as important as it is. They’re the key to keeping a handle on these technologies that, once out there, can never be abandoned save when something better at their job comes along. Can’t always rely on that, and even when it happens, the same challenges are present which tools like this are so important in the act of solving.