Getting First on Google – Keyword Density Explained

 In Marketing, Recommended, Sales, SEO, Technology

When you begin optimizing your website for the search engines, or become involved in traffic generation strategies, it’s likely that you will hear the term ‘keyword density’.

Keyword density is simply the ratio of keywords in relation to the number of words on any given page.  For the most part, you want to strive to reach a balanced density level so that search engine crawlers are given a clear understanding of what keywords are relevant to your website.  Typically, a keyword density of 2-15% will suffice.

Apart from the actual density of your content, you should also consider keyword proximity, prominence and the actual order of your keywords.

The proximity of your keywords in relation to one another is a very important aspect to search engine optimization.  The way is works is very simple:  When you enter in a search term using the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, you wrap the text in quotations for better accuracy in regards to the search results.

The search engines then seek out websites that have the complete keyword phrase that you entered, rather than individual keywords.

For example, if you entered in the term, “Houston SEO Training” with quotes, it would only generate results from websites that contain the entire phrase, however without quotes, sites that only had the keyword “Houston”, “Training” and “SEO” would appear.

It’s important to make sure that you use complete keyword phrases, in the correct order, throughout your website content.  If you are hoping to rank for the long tail keyword phrase “scrapbook supplies at cost”, make sure you use that full length keyword term within your content, so that whenever someone enters in that exact phrase using Google or Yahoo, your website is likely to appear.

As for the actual prominence of a keyword phrase, this simply indicates the first appearance of the keyword on your webpage.  If a keyword phrase appears in the first few paragraphs (preferably first few lines) it is deemed more important than a keyword that only appears at the bottom of the page.  This means that you need to pay attention to WHERE and WHEN your keywords appear, placing keywords that are of most importance at the start of your content.

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