Does Google Still Take Keywords Into Account When Displaying Search Results?

Answer 1: Yes, the search engine most people use does concern itself with showing accurate information about what people try to find online.

OR: read the following answer to your question (Hint: it’s the better one):

Answer 2: Yes, there are clear signs that Google still takes keywords into account when it shows search results. It would be pretty weird to show results for what someone searches for without using the words that person searched for.

As you can see in Answer 2, you understand what I’m typing much better, because you get to read the words you had in mind when you typed your own words.. your own keywords.

My keywords match your keywords, and you prefer Answer 2 to Answer 1. So if Google sent you to a page that only had Answer 1, you’d feel like you landed on the wrong page and you’d hit the BACK button in your browser. That sends Google a signal that you didn’t like the page.

Their people and their system have seen this happen quite often.

In the first answer, I just wrote words similar to your keywords, and you felt like you weren’t reading an answer to your exact question.

Engineers at Google know these things better than anyone else. Don’t believe the hype, and don’t believe articles written only to make their authors sound smart.

When you use the right words, it’s easier for your answers and your pages to match the intent of the person who searches.

A page that’s 100% optimized for a keyword in the Squirrly Live Assistant, with the items in Focus Pages turned green, is written for that exact keyword. That gives it a better match than pages that weren’t written for it, but no tool can guarantee a position in Google.

Sometimes, you’ll see the TOP 10 positions for “anime toys” be completely different from the TOP 10 positions for “best anime toys”, or “anime best toys”, etc.

Google knows that people need to see the keywords they searched for inside the articles they land on. For one more sign of this, look at how Google picks the META Description it shows in search results. Sometimes it ignores the META Description you wrote and shows its user a description that’s as close to the exact keywords as possible.

So Google keeps using keywords. [This article is about keywords in general, NOT about META keywords.]