Something that has kind of been on my mind lately is the talk about what most novice SEOers may be spending too much of their time on. There is a lot that you will be taking in when you first are starting out in the SEO industry. Each day with my new job (sorry I may have forgotten to mention that) I am on the phone talking with our clients about all of the different things that we can do for their websites. I’ll go through talking about their Meta Data, Title, Description, Alt tags, keyword density, Inbound links, Social media, etc.
It can be a lot to take in, and I know that there have been a few clients that seemed a little overwhelmed with all of the different aspects that I would be talking about to them. Which is why they are very interested to know the kind of packages and items that we can offer them, so that they don’t have to worry about it. Â It’s what we are there for to offer.
I always work to follow what Matt Cutts talks about over at Google. He can at times be very vague in what it is that he is trying to describe, but that is his job since Google isn’t going to flat out tell you how their algorithm works. He had posted a video from last year talking about one of the things that he feels most SEO’s spend too much time on. So here it is for you to take in:
So I agree a ton with what Matt is talking about. I see a lot of people that will talk about how many times they should put a keyword in their content on their page. Yeah that is nice, but it is not going to be a huge factor in your rankings like it was back in the beginning of the world of search engines.
The major problem was a lot of people who wanted to try and beat the system of the search engines was to just “stuff” their website with tons and tons of keywords.  Either they would put it into the content so much that it wouldn’t actually make any sense at all, or they would put hidden text into the content. Such as down at the bottom of the page, just before the footer, they would put white text of the keyword on the page over and over again. A typical user would not see this since it would be hidden by the white space on the page, but when a search engine crawled the site they would see that keyword within the page over and over again, and then believe that your site would be more relevant.
That is a very Black Hat thing to do, and the search engines have gotten smarter than what they were. They see this all of the time. You might possibly be up in the rankings for your keyword term for a few days or maybe a few weeks, but eventually it’s going to be noticed and you will be delisted or be stuck a few pages back in the search results and not ever be found on the front pages of Google ever again.
Now I may have made the mistake in thinking that you already know what Keyword Density is. Typically I write to an audience that does SEO and already know this term. But I understand that some of you may be asking “What Is Keyword Density?” Well let me help answer that question for you. Â When you are wanting to know what exactly is the percentage or density of the keyword you are using in a blog post or article, or a page for that matter you use this formula to determine it:
Keyword Density = ([Keyword Count]*100)/(Total Word Count]
So lets give you an example. Â Say that you are wanting to build a page promoting an product from an affiliate program that you just signed up for. It’s an interesting product that you have faith in and want to hopefully make some side money off of. You write a lot of information on your page about the product and want to be sure that it’s interesting, engaging, and doesn’t look like spam. You throw in the keyword you want to rank for every so often. say 12 times on the page. Â You look at the amount of words that you have put on the page and then throw it into the formula that I just gave you:
Total Words: 500
Keyword used: 12
Keyword Density (KD) = (12*100)/500
So we do a little math and our answer becomes:
KD = 2.4 or 2.4%
A lot of novices will want to know what the secret is to finding the perfect percentage to get themselves at the top of the rankings. That is something that people have asked Google and Matt Cutts comes back again to answer that question. Here is a video he did to answer:
Now in here notice that he doesn’t say that keyword density isn’t a factor within their algorithm, because it is, but do pay attention to the fact that it’s not that important. There are thousands of different things that can factor in if you are going to rank well or not for your keyword term. Don’t obsess just over the density. You can go overboard and that can really hurt you. Just make sure that you at least mention once or twice the term that you want to rank for, and get build your content in something that is relevant and interesting.
Of course if you have any questions please feel free to post them in the comments, and let me know what I can do to help you.
