keyword prominence

Prominence is placement, not repetition

Density counts how often a keyword appears; prominence is about where it sits. Google does not publish “prominence” as a named signal, but its own guidance points the same way. The title-link documentation lists the <title> element, the main visual title, heading elements such as the <h1>, og:title meta tags, and “other content that’s large and prominent through the use of style treatments” among the sources Google reads when it generates a page’s title link. The SEO Starter Guide tells you to write a title that “accurately describes the contents of the page” and to consider “the words that a user might search for.”

Put the target term where those systems look first:

• the <title> tag, near the front
• the H1
• the first 100 words of body copy
• the URL slug and a subheading or two

The caveat matters. Google warns that “excessively repeating the same words over and over (even in variations)” is against its spam policies, and that a title reading “Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars” “can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.” Prominence is a one-time, natural placement, not a quota. Google’s language matching also reads synonyms and context, so a page can rank for terms it never states verbatim. Treat prominence as a clarity check: does the first thing a crawler and a reader see name the topic in plain words?