In the keywords tutorial, we talked about
keywords and the importance of using them in both your meta tags, for reasons other than Google,
and in your content. Now we're going to talk
about keyword density and how it becomes important.
Basically, keywords tell the search engines what it is you do. The keyword density, or how often you use those words in your content,
tells them how important you feel those words are. One of the biggest problems we see when looking at a website, and of course looking
at the meta tag keywords, is that what people have put in as their keywords aren't on their pages very much, if at all.
There are plenty of references to keyword density on the internet. The majority say that Google likes to see a keyword density of
around 2%, whereas other search engines don't mind if the keyword density is around 5%. What that means is that, out of all the words
you've written on a page, your keywords shouldn't be more than, nor much less than 2%. Now, if you're at 2.5% I'm sure they won't
penalize you, but if you're at 10% or 50% then all the search engines are going to ignore your page. And if you're not at least near
the percentages, you're probably going to rank low when people look for your product or services.
This is where writing good content comes into play, and why research up front is important. The first thing is deciding what keywords
you hope to rank highly for. In the tutorial, we used the word "toys" as an example. Let's dig deeper and say you're selling
toy cars. Then let's say that you're selling red and blue cars. Then, one more step, let's say you're selling a brand of cars known
as "Snow". If you only wrote 100 words for your content, you'd want to make sure you used the word "toys" only 2 to 5 times;
the same goes for the other words. Proper keyword density means you're not overloading your text, and in that fashion you won't have
your site penalized for what's known as "keyword spam".
Now you have to decide what to say, in 100 words or so, that will make sense and get all of your words in. This is the problem with
writing minimal copy; sometimes, if you're trying to key on certain words and phrases, if you write too little your content doesn't
make sense. Also, it's the problem with trying to target one word items rather than phrases, which is what most people will type into
search engines. But if you write a lot, you need to make sure that you still get your keywords mentioned in some logical fashion that
also gets at least some of them mentioned enough times to make it count.
Two quick points to close out this article on keyword density. One, more is better, if it helps to highlight what you do. The
more you write, the better chance the search engines have to figure out what it is you do, as long as you make sure your main search
term keywords are prominent in your content. And two, going back at least once a month to either change up the content, or adding
content to your page in general, helps you retain any prominence you might have, and could help you move up the ladder.
© SEO Xcellence, 2009
