Internet Business - The Truth About Keyword Density and SEO

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The Truth About Keyword Density and SEO

When I posted about "On-Page SEO: Keyword Density Checker", I said that keyword density is an important aspect to work on from on-page SEO perspective. That comment brought up a lot of debates from a couple of my friends.

Before we proceed further, let's get the definition of keyword density for people who are not already familiar with it.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword Density is the percentages of the appearance of keywords on a page with respect to the total number of words of the page. For example, if the keyword "business" appears once in a page with 100 words, the keyword density for "business" is 1%.

Is keyword density useless? No.

Keyword density does play a certain role in the ranking of a page on a website. But there is really no real optimal keyword density on a website. This is because keyword density is only one of many aspects of how search engines rank a page.

Keyword Density Myth:

Some say you need to have at least 5% to 10% keyword density for the keywords that you want to rank well on every page.
If you have more than 10% keyword density for any keyword you will get penalized.

Keyword Density Facts:

Google never made public on penalizing pages with keyword density over a certain percentage.
There are sites that rank very well but with keyword density as high as 40% for certain keywords.

Generally Speaking...

When you add content to a page, you want to make sure the keywords that you want to rank for do appear a couple of times. Actually, as much as possible WITHOUT sounding robotic or repetitive.

A good copywriter has the ability to come up with articles that sound natural and human, but at the same time with as many keywords as possible. When a good copywriter creates an article, the appearance of important keywords comes naturally!

What If I Am Not a Good Copywriter?

No problem! Here is a list of couple of things you can do...

Step 1. Expand and generate a list of keywords from the domain name. (This is why you need to have a good domain name; a good domain name has keywords in it)

Step 2. Create subpages with proper anchor text in the URLs focused on the list of keywords you generated above.

For example, let's say you have the domain: http://www.laptop.com, the list of keywords that you want to optimize could be:

Laptop Deals
Laptop Reviews
Laptop Brands
Laptop Performance
Laptop Buyer Guide
Laptop For School
...etc.

For the keywords listed above, the URLs for the subpages should be:

http://www.laptop.com/laptop-deals
http://www.laptop.com/laptop-reviews
http://www.laptop.com/laptop-brands
http://www.laptop.com/laptop-performance
http://www.laptop.com/laptop-buyer-guide
http://www.laptop.com/laptop-for-school
...etc.

Then the keywords for each subpage can be "extracted" from their URLs:

For subpage (Laptop Details), keywords to optimize are: "laptop", "deals"
For subpage (Laptop Buyer Guide), keywords to optimize are: "laptop", "buyer", "guide"

Step 3. For each of the subpage, properly optimize them by following this guide: "Simple DIY On-Page SEO That You Should Know"

If you are not sure where to start, the 3 steps above are what you should follow on optimizing the content and the structure of a website from SEO perspective. The rest of your work should be on developing and executing link building strategies.

Aaron

SEO Entrepreneur

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