I just returned from an amazing SEO conference in Seattle. The team at SEOmoz really outdid themselves putting on this conference.

The most memorable lecture was by Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz's head R&D guy (in the picture on the right). As he spoke, you could notice a mixture of enthusiasm and sleep deprivation in his mannerisms. He'd been up all night working on something. We had a chat about it at the Garage bowling / pizza party Tuesday night.

Ben explained that up until this point there'd been two major factors affecting the rank of web page in search results:

1. Having good links pointing to the web page
2. Placing the target keywords on the web page and inside the link anchor text

He's found a third factor! I won't pretend to understand all the science behind it, but here's the idea.

Google seems to group words that belong in the same theme or topic together. By looking at the words around keywords, Google decides which topic the keywords belong to. Have a look at these examples:

A) Britney Spears to release a new album this Winter, including three new music videos.

B) The tribesman shook his spear at the explorer menacingly, as if preparing to strike.

Both examples include the "spear" keyword. How can Google tell what topic each passage relates to? Well it has a look at the words around "spear".

For example A), we have words like:

• release
• album
• music video

For example B), spear is surrounded by:

• tribesman
• shook
• menacingly
• strike
• explorer

Both examples contain very different topics, and Google knows this. It calculates a pages relevance to a set of keywords by looking at the topical words around it. So if you're building a Britney Spears fan page, and start writing about ancient weaponry, Google is going to penalize your web page in search results for "britney spears".

Keep your on page content on topic! The more relevant your page vocabulary is, the higher you'll rank for your search terms.