Dr. Garcia emailed me today with a very nice update to his article on Targeting Documents and Terms Through Co-Occurrence Data. It was a great piece when it came out, and his refinements only serve to make it more usable to the general SEO populace. It's my view that only the insane don't give Dr. G and his work respect, but that's another issue.

Some excellent quotes:

"this article is about targeting terms and documents, not about determining term importance and keyword competitiveness, as some SEOs may think. While term importance in a document is a semantic, content and context bearing property, keyword competitiveness is strongly influenced by offer-demand and ROI dynamics. Term and document targeting, at least as treated in this article, is about the likelihood of finding specific terms and documents through queries. It is more about selectivity; i.e. about the discriminatory power of a term when queried.

Since these three components (term importance, competitiveness, and selectivity) are related and affect each other, they also affect site traffic. Thus, an optimal term condition should be a function of at least these three; i.e.

Optimal Condition = f(importance, competitiveness, selectivity)

An optimum term then is not just a term that is semantically valuable or competitive. It need to be a term with a discriminating power. Other variables may influence the optimal condition of a term. I'm just limiting the discussion to these three since these are the most relevant to SEOs and users."

Thanks for the pointers, Doc. We in SEO can, on occassion, be a bit daft about what to do with your research, so making things crystal clear really helps.