Co-occurrence – Your Website/Blog Needs This!

What is Co-Occurrence?

Uh...Say what?!? You know, "Co-occurrence"... That really strange word thingy that can get your website or blog ranked for certain terms or phrases without necessarily having links or even optimizing for that term or phrase! This could happen in one of the following two ways: 1) When you comment on blogs or forums and you mention your website or brand name in conjunction with a particular keyword phrase, or 2) When other people on the internet mention your brand or website name and it co-occurs with a particular keyword phrase (E.g. Hey John, I've heard allot of people saying that MattsAffiliateJourney.com is teaching folks all about affiliate marketing and SEO...). See, I don't have any links in that sentence, but you can still tell what website they were talking about and the information is very relevant.
After reading that sentence, you will definitely want to go and read MattsAffiliateJourney.com if SEO or Affiliate Marketing is what your interested in or searching for. Over the course of time, and as they "see" more and more websites talking about the same things, Google will start to "feel" the same way, and they will start directing people who search for Affiliate Marketing and/or SEO to MattsAffiliateJourney.com, which is of course what we're all looking for, right? Traffic!

The way that I see it, getting links and putting a particular anchor text that you were trying to rank for in those links (old school SEO or the traditional way if you will), is kinda' the easy/lazy way of doing things. Creating and publishing unique, relevant, and useful content that mentions a particular brand or website and then proves to the readers of that content why they should use or buy from this brand/website is a hard job! Especially when you think about the fact that this needs to be done repetitively across the internet on various websites!

Allot of SEOs and publishers (blog owners) seem to feel like that links are dying and there is absolutely no need to use them any more. Last November the Moz is really the one that got all of this discussion started about anchor text dying and co-occurrence taking over, and allot of internet marketers and SEOs, including myself, believe that Rand is completely correct about all of this co-occurrence stuff. However, I believe that Google will simply use co-occurrence as just one of their weighing factors when determining relevance or ranking a page, and I also believe (...and I have hard proof) that links are not dead, and anchor text is NOT dead because people and search engines including Google will always want links to help them get to these other websites that they're reading about. After all, who wants to have to type in the name of every website, blog, or page into the address bar of their browser that they wanna visit? Absolutely No One! However, if you are going to survive online in this post Panda/Penguin world, then you must vary your anchor text, drastically! with approx. 10% or less density of back links' anchor text containing your primary keywords! The rest of your links should be very general terms such as "click here", "read more", etc.

Rethink Your Content Marketing Plans

First of all I hate to use industry buzz terms such as "content marketing", but whatever you call it, I still want you to start thinking differently about it. The overall idea of your whole plan should be: Get your brand and/or products out there on as many blogs and forums as possibly can. Ask other blog owners to let you create some great content for them and give your brand a quick mention somewhere in the text of the article. Remember, you don’t need to link to your website, just mention your content and brand (co-occurrence) on their site, which keeps you in Google’s good graces.

Please remember, you do want to be in their good graces! You do not want to be one of those people that thumbs their nose in the air spouting off saying: "Forget Google, I don't need them!" Just let a couple of months go by and then ask them: "Hey, how is it going without Google in your life?" ...bet you already know how that's gonna go, don't you!

Again, just remember this: It’s not rocket science! The more places you put your content out on the internet on various (relevant) blogs and websites, the better your chances will be of someone reading your post or comment and finding that info to be beneficial to them. You can bet on one thing, if people are finding it useful and helpful, then Google will feel the same way about it and they will reward you by ranking you highly for the keywords that are relevant to your content.

The Proof is in the Patent...

As a final note, I just wanted to include this piece of information about Google's recently approved patent which proves that they are indeed using co-occurrence, but please don't let all of these technical details weigh you down and confuse you! Just stick to the basics that we have already discussed and you are going to shine like new money when it comes to ranking your website and building a useful, informative, and helpful resource for your readers.

Patent Name: Document ranking using word relationships
Invented by: Sharad Jain
Assigned to: Google
US Patent #: 8,321,409
Granted on: November 27, 2012
Filed: June 30, 2011

Abstract:

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, for scoring documents. A plurality of documents with an initial ordering is received. Local term relationships between terms in the plurality of documents are identified, each local term relationship being a relationship between a pair of terms in a respective document.

Relationships among the documents in the plurality of documents are determined based on the local term relationships and on the initial order of the documents. A respective score is determined for each document in the plurality of documents based on the document relationships.

As you can see, Google is scoring documents based on the most important terms and phrases that it finds on those documents so that it can rank them appropriately in the search results when a person is searching for a particular phrase. Bill Slawski, an extremely smart and knowledgeable person in the SEO arena, wrote an excellent post about Google's patent and he explains it in quite detail much better than I ever could.

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