We have shifted to having all account managers writing the Search Made Simple posts and now it falls to me to analogise for today so……
Keyword density is like interior design; just as you wouldn’t have a room stuffed full of chairs you wouldn’t stuff your pages with keywords.
But hey I hear you say, what is keyword density in the first place? Well it’s the measure of the amount of times that you use a keyword on a page when compared to the rest of the page.
There have been myths around the perfect density that will cause you to rank for every term under the sun for a while now, but unfortunately some of these opinions are a little mistaken.
A good tip is when writing web copy it is about having a natural flow and balance. Speak as you would normally speak to your target audience and mention (key)words as often as you would normally mention them.
Do you remember what they said in school? They always said to me at least once you’ve written something read it out aloud, following the punctuation, and if it sounds okay then it probably is. I said it was search made simple didn’t I!
SEM is about many factors contributing to form a big difference and in this sense it is possible to rank for a term that isn’t on your page (see Google bombing) however why you would not put it on your page if your page is about that word or idea is a mystery in its own right.
Putting keywords in the title tag, the H1 tag and using them between one and two times per hundred words or so is great. Don’t forget anchor text, alt tags, meta descriptions and all of the other places you can put them, but only put it in these places if it is actually relevant. Meta descriptions and writing really great copy are my favs and my god will this get you higher rankings and more sales than worrying about keyword density!
Putting it another way, from a search engine’s perspective they want to deliver the most relevant page to your search query and therefore could consider pages that heavily repeat keywords to be very relevant, however actually that is a considerable logical flaw as there is actually no link between the relevancy of something and the number of keyword repetitions on the page. This is like saying that no text should have a higher keyword density for the word God than the Bible otherwise it would become more relevant to God than the Bible.
So I think that about wraps up my first Search Made Simple, if this wasn’t simple enough I shall further endeavour next time! However if anyone would like to comment on this please do so, it’s always nice to get some feedback especially on a subject like this.