In natural language processing, co-occurrence refers to the frequency with which two or more words appear together in a corpus of text, such as a collection of web pages or documents. The basic idea is that if two words frequently appear together, they are likely to be semantically related or have some kind of association.
Co-occurrence analysis helps search engines, like Google, to better understand the relationships between words and group them by topic and meaning. For example, if the words “link building” and “keyword research” frequently appear together in the same sentence or paragraph across a range of web pages, we can infer that they are often associated with each other in the context of the text.
Search engines can potentially analyze co-occurrence in search queries and in links’ anchor texts. However, the concept of co-occurrence does not influence the website’s organic search ranking positions.
However, understanding co-occurrence can help to identify relevant keywords and understand how search engines work.