Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Significance concern

I've got a site about a hotel, which has a wordpress plug-in translating the page in bunch of languages. Because of it it has the word "flag" in various combinations as alt and title tag bunch of times. As a result google keyword tool shows that "flag" is much more significant for my site than it's subject "hotel"



Do you think that might be a problem and my site considered not that relevant to what it's actually about?
Do you think that bunch of alt and title tags can turn the subject of the site around?
There is plenty of text, videos and images about the primary topic of the site. The flag thing is just a plug in in the side bar, yet it seems to be the most significant word on my site...

I have the same thing on my site happening with "glossary". I'd be interested in others' opinions on this too.

I also see inane things hitting high in my GWMT keyword lists. My impression is that Google isn't saying this keyword is the most significant one on your site, but rather that your site is considered significant to the word "flag".

It probably just comes down to the shear amount of competing content for the subject of "hotel" versus the subject of "flag".

I often see the word "cart" ranking high on e-commerce sites I work on, even tho it appears sparsely on any given page compared to target keywords. I assume it's just because there are fewer pages of content on the internet devoted to "cart" than there are pages devoted to the products we're selling. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of pages about various kinds of carts, but there are easily hundreds of thousands if not millions of competing pages for our main keywords.

In any case I don't worry about it much, I'm still getting far more traffic from my target keywords than from "cart"

I would agree UberDude though not sure competition levels have any impact. Where'd you get that idea from?

I was just referring to the fact that content is inherently in "competition" with other similar content. So if you have a site devoted to a very mainstream subject/keyword, and that site has a relatively obscure subject/keyword mentioned a couple of times, GWMT might tell you that your use of the obscure keyword is more "significant" than your use of the mainstream keyword. Even though the mainstream keyword appears repeatedly on your site and the obscure keyword only appears a couple of times.

Anyway, it's just something that popped into my head when I saw this thread. I haven't experimented to see if it actually works that way.

Keyword significance is what I deem to determine Googlebots attempt at finding your Topic relevance to a certain subject. Google has long been trying to development a more Semantic Search engine and in the future I believe this to take a bigger and bigger part in googles algo.

For search engine development and AI development, a key component to human level understanding is Semantic Meaning. Bots aren't that smart yet, and google bot is definitely not that smart at determining meaning. It's trying to determining meaning in a very loose way from the keywords that we use on a site and listing them as Topically "Significantly".

So what does this mean?

Well I don't have a huge amount of data to draw from, but from my own work having a Significant Keyword in webmaster tools seems will make it easier to rank on topics with those keywords. It is also a good way to find potential link partners.

So If you have "Dog" in your Significant keywords you should find it easier to rank on page 1 for key phrases that deal with that keyword. Dog Collars, Dog Houses, etc. I only say "easier". At the end of the day it's links that drive your ranks and difficult really determined by competition.

With keyword significance, google is giving us a taste of what it believes our sites are about.

If you care about the future as I do, in order to hedge against future google algo changes that make it more semantic. I would add more content dealing with the subjects you want to rank on. This should naturally increase the keyword density of keywords related to that topic and thus change your keyword significant list. Not to mention its just good solid seo practice.

Frankly I'm not that impressed by the above rather long winded treatise speculating about not much at all of any practical value. I've read through four times trying to get to the main point and I'm still scratching my head.

The conclusion seems awry too. I'm not all sure that the significant phrases are being driven by density in copy. In deed from what I've seen the internal anchor text is a big part of this, quite at odds with what is described above. In my opinion Google pays attention to the presence of words on pages but very little to density and frequency except where it is excessive.

I also find that my ranking doesn't agree with the supposed significant phrase.


The idea that phrases that are remarkable against surrounding low competition suggested earlier is however interesting, does anyone have real data or knowledge on that?

That interests me because obviously Google reports "uncommon" words.