Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page, toward the beginning of a paragraph, or toward the beginning of a tag will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.
For example, a search in a major search engine for the keyword "Pre-Owned Electronics" returned the following match:
Pre-Owned Electronics, Inc - Refurbished and Used Apple Macintosh Systems, The independent source for new, remanufactured and used Apple Macintosh computer systems, parts, peripherals and accessories. We offer a full line of refurbished as well as used… 98% http://www.preowned.com/ (Size 3.1K)
Note that the queried keyword, "Pre-Owned Electronics," is the first word of the site title, and a major search engine returned this site as the first match. Documents that are exactly the same but with keywords as the second or third words in the title may score lower. Prominence also applies to the words within the body of the document, the headings, and other tags.
Prominence not only plays a critical role in the search engines, but it is also very important in directory-based engines such as Yahoo. With directories, having the keyword phrase slightly more towards the beginning of the site description or site title will often make a large difference in your ranking.
Examples of prominence:
If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.
If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be around 50%.
If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.
If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.
If the area consists of multiple parts (like having 3 heading tags on the page) then all three areas are treated as a single contiguous area when prominence is calculated.
In summary, you don't need to worry too much about how prominence is calculated. Basically it is only a score to give you a general indication of how close to the start of an area for which your keywords appear.
When running Page Critic, you may run a test on the page you are working on, and in the returned results, you might see a recommendation something like this:
The first result is saying that your keyword prominence may be too weak
in your title.
Solution: Move your keyword or keyword phrase to
the beginning of the title. Save the change and run Page Critic again. Now you
have only the second issue to deal with:
A keyword prominence of at least 53% is suggested for the Body Text area. Your prominence is 0.0% right now, so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Body Text.
In this case, you will do the same thing only within the body text this time. Actually, what it boils down to is re-writing your text so that it still reads well to the human brain but also positions the keyword phrase much more "prominently" or towards the beginning of a sentence or paragraph.
EXAMPLE: (Assuming the keyword phrase is "deep sea fishing")
If your title is:
How to get the most out of deep sea fishing
and you want to increase prominence, you might just re-write it like this:
Deep sea fishing - How to get the best results
EXAMPLE:
If your keyword prominence is suffering in your body text for the keywords "mortgages" and "financing," how might we improve prominence in the following example?
Compare this:
We would be happy to provide you with our current up-to-the-minute rates by e-mail. For mortgages or financing, don't miss our newest feature articles on long term mortgages or "mortgages for the credit impaired."
With this:
For mortgages or financing, don't miss our newest feature articles on long term mortgages or "mortgages for the credit impaired." We would be happy to provide you with our current up-to-the-minute rates by e-mail.
By simply adjusting sentence structure, we can say something similar but give more prominence to our choice keyword terms. In this fashion, when you re-run Page Critic, you will notice marked improvements in Page Critic's analysis.
Other simple examples for increasing prominence:
Increasing prominence for a geographic region?
Change this text: (the bolded phrase would be the location you are trying
to improve prominence for)
The ABC Book Company is one of the largest, retailers in Toronto, Ontario.
to this:
Toronto, Ontario is home to the ABC Book Company, one of its largest local retailers.
Perhaps you are working on a more specific keyword
phrase.
Change this:
One of the most beautiful and fascinating birds is the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird.
to this:
The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is one of the most beautiful and fascinating birds.
or better yet:
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird - These are one of the most beautiful and fascinating birds.
The examples above are simplified to demonstrate that sometimes much can be gained by just re-writing a passage or paragraph to increase the prominence of a search phrase by moving it forward in a paragraph or higher on the page. Yet, the text will still read well without changing the meaning of what is written.