question about DIV tag

i am trying to see how top sites in real difficult keywords are using concept like this:

<div id="exact match query">buy exact match query</div>

i search online pharmacy, DUI lawyer, and could not find any sites that has a div code like this.

do you guys have any sample sites?

Highly doubt that has anything to do with SEO, more to do with either a class call, script trigger or on page model or some simple styling element.

<div> and class names that include the keyword do give a slight boost.

lbhbochc said:

<div> and class names that include the keyword do give a slight boost.

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Do you have a source for this? Highly skeptical. Google definitely does not take classes, id's etc into account from what I know.

ProgressiveWeb said:

Do you have a source for this? Highly skeptical. Google definitely does not take classes, id's etc into account from what I know.

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They absolutely do. Wish I could give you evidence, but this is coming from personal testing plus SEO groups I'm a part of.

It's not something I would spend a lot of time worrying about, but it is a place to put keywords if you need to bump up your keyword density a bit without ruining the flow of your writing.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Google reads the entire DOM, so they know if keywords are in div tags and classes.

lbhbochc said:

Google reads the entire DOM, so they know if keywords are in div tags and classes.

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Exactly. Hence a trivially easy way for people to try and "trick" the algorithm, and keyword stuff, and an equally trivially thing for google to filter for.

ProgressiveWeb said:

Exactly. Hence a trivially easy way for people to try and "trick" the algorithm, and keyword stuff, and an equally trivially thing for google to filter for.

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I get what you're saying, and you're right, it does seem like one of those low hanging fruits that would've been picked by Google. But I think that enough people are coding illiterate that it's never really been an issue. Especially now that I'm certain 90% of people building sites have no idea what div tags even are since Wix and Squarespace don't require users to deal with them.

However, the same could be said for image alt tags. We know that Google looks for keywords in the alt tags, and that keyword stuffing in the alt tag can have a negative effect on a page. To me, that just strengthens the argument for div and class tags keywords being taken into consideration by Google.

Anyway, like I said, it doesn't seems like the algorithm weighs div and class keywords as heavily as keywords in the main content.

Div tags are only used to structure a page. I can't see why they would bother reading it/scanning it for any kind of SEO effect if anything 'google' would class it as keyword stuffing.

It is in the same class as hiding content on a page. Might get away with it but if it was ever stumbled upon or caught in an update it would be classed as trying to manipulate the ranking algorithm and result in a penalty.

Alt tags are used to describe the image for people with screen readers. This is why when people compare one site to another and can't understand why a site is performing better than another it's simple one was coded by someone who knows what they are doing the other is coded by a monkey.