Think Keyword Density is Still a Factor

Think Keyword Density is Still a Factor? Prove It!

As I read her email I could literally feel my blood pressure rising. She’d heard me speak at a webinar I did for Wordtracker about ecommerce copywriting where I said keyword density hadn’t been a factor in SEO copywriting for years. The lump in my throat got bigger as Zoe (not her real name) explained why she thought the myth about keyword density simply wouldn’t die.

“Keyword density is going to remain a hot (contentious) topic. I just read an article in the “New Yorker” yesterday about the new AOL CEO: “Can Tim Armstrong save AOL?” Apparently AOL is going to put greater focus on being content providers. Here’s an excerpt from page 36:

The writing, too, is often designed to appeal more to search engines than to readers. In the list of “contributor resources” for Seed, the most prominent category is for “search engine optimization”–S.E.O.–the process of packing stories with words that will make them appear higher in the list of results that Google and Bing display when users search for terms related to the subject. Seed links to guidelines that instruct writers to pay attention to what is called “keyword density”: the number of times that certain phrases appear in a story as a percentage of total words in a piece. If you’re writing a story on herbal tea, you should use that phrase early and often.’

“So, while I’ve read articles by plenty of respected SEO experts who insist they’ve tested various keyword density models and it doesn’t correlate with returns, I have to say I’ve read at least as many articles like this that still bang the keyword density drum. Well you can see how the mixed messages can be frustrating.”

“Writing often designed to appeal more to search engines?” “Packing stories with words?” Arrgg! Give me a break! Talk about old school. Keyword density has not been a valid measure of SEO copywriting success in probably 8-10 years now.

• Do you need to include keyphrases in your copy? Yes.
• Do you need to “pack” your copy with keywords? No.
• Does your content need to appeal more to search engines than people. Absolutely not!

Yet, dreadfully, Zoe is right about one thing. There are still plenty of so-called experts out there that will swear to you copy must be written to a certain keyword density percentage. They’ll vow that this is the only way to write search engine optimized copy. To those who believe this, I say:

Oh Yeah? Prove It!

Have you ever tested it? Or are you just blindly following this outdated myth that refuses to die?

I can prove that keyword density is not an issue. Can you prove – quantifiably show me in a measurable form – that copy must have a certain keyword density to rank high? I’m sure you’ve written pages that have a 2%, 5% or even 10% keyword density ratio, but what happens if you drop some of those phrases from the copy? Does the ranking drop? Not in my experience.

In fact, clients have hired me to rewrite their previously awful-sounding copy to be more natural. While the former copy was not keyword stuffed, it did not flow very well at all. Rewriting it without so many keyphrase mentions not only improved conversions, but also *increased* rankings.

When writing SEO copy for my clients, I don’t ever calculate keyword density and the pages rank consistently well.

From as far back as 2006, Matt Cutts (Google’s Antispam Chief) and other officials have stated that keyword density is a non-issue. Here are just a few quotes from Matt and Google.

2006: “I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.” — Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love/

2008: “Keyword Density: Not really a factor. Yes keyword should be present but density is not important. Include the keyword but make writing sound natural.” — Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-webmaster-chat-today/

2009: “As long as I’ve been at Google, keyword density has not been a core factor in either the main site text, title tag or any of the other associated tags.” — Adam Lasnik speaking at Search Masters ’09

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhknZUEueKc (About 3:00 mins into the video)

2010: “‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.” — Google Webmaster Central

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66358

Please, PLEASE don’t just follow along with what the majority of people online are repeating. If you read interviews from AOL saying they instruct writers to use keyword density and you also read blog posts from reliable sources telling you not to subscribe to keyword density ratios, test it yourself. Find out for yourself who’s telling the truth.

Remember what your mother used to ask you: “If your best friend jumped off a 100-foot cliff, would you do it, too?” Honestly, whether we’re talking about SEO copywriting or not, following the crowd is usually the kiss of death. Keyword density is no exception.

Backlinking Your Way to the Top

Backlinking Your Way to the Top

What is a Backlink?

What’s all this hoopla over backlinks? Every SEO forum and blog you stop by is constantly touting the power and necessity of backlinks so they must be a pretty big deal! So what exactly is a backlink? Simply put, a backlink is a link on another website (external) that leads to a page on your website. For instance, a link on this page to a page on another website would be a backlink for THAT webpage.

How do Backlinks Help us Rank?

Think of it like this: backlinks are human citation. In a sense, we decide what pages we, as internet users, want to show up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by linking to the content we like. A page with more links of a higher quality than others will rank higher. The part about quality is really important. It’s not just about who has the most backlinks, it’s about where those links are from.

If you were trying to lose weight, would you be more inclined to trust the opinion of some Joe Shmo or of a professional health expert? This principle is applied to backlinks and the way they affect our rankings. Links from sites that are established as authorities (like the health expert) carry much more weight than a link from someone commenting in a fitness forum somewhere. Google weighs out these links and their value using their complex algorithm and uses this data to decide how to rank your website/webpage. Your site does not have to be a monster authority site to rank highly. Rather, you can rank highly by getting high quality backlinks from other authority sites.

Let’s pretend that the health expert from earlier told us that Joe Shmo actually made some good points and his opinions are quite valid. Wouldn’t we start to trust Joe Shmo more and see more value in his opinion? Similarly, if an authority health site linked to Joe Shmo’s small niche site, Google would realize that maybe Joe’s site is more authoritative then they realized, and they would rank it higher. The web is not controlled by computers. It is run by people, and this is reflected in the way we act and link online. Search Engines know this and respond accordingly to try to give us the results that we demand and construct ourselves.

How do we get Backlinks?

Now that we know the importance of backlinks and why they affect our rankings the way they do, we need to figure out how we can get some. A full answer to this question might take some hundreds of pages, so we’re going to take a broad view of some backlinking strategies to get a good idea of how to get quality backlinks.

Sadly, backlinking isn’t as simple or straight forward as our health expert example above. You’re not so likely to be granted a link from some powerful authority such as CNN or Apple just for creating great content. Our techniques are going to have to be a little more guerilla-esque. This isn’t to say that the quality of your content doesn’t matter, it’s quite the opposite. At the core of your marketing and backlinking strategy should be great, quality content. We’ll assume you already know how to make great content and get on with the backlinking.

There are many different ways to get backlinks and each of the methods takes time to learn and master. Rather than getting super-in-depth with any single backlinking strategy, I’m going to provide you with a list of ways to get backlinks. We are going to continue this SEO course by covering the governing principles of backlinks and how to measure their quality – knowledge you can apply to every single backlinking method successfully. Here’s a comprehensive list of ways to get backlinks:

• Free blogs (blogger, wordpress, squidoo)
• Profile backlinks 
• Blog commenting 
• Article Marketing 
• Press releases 
• Social Bookmarks 
• Website directories 
• Blog Carnivals 
• Video marketing 
• Forum Commenting 
• Document Distributors 
• Podcast Directories 
• Software Distributors

Each of these methods can be deeply explored to achieve the best results. For this SEO Course, we are instead going to cover the factors that make a great backlink.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyper-link. For example, if you look at the links in the resource box for this article, one of them has the anchor text “SEO Course” while the other simply has my website’s URL as the anchor text.

Anchor text is very powerful and has a big impact on how effective a backlink is. Anchor text gives search engines a quick glimpse of what the page on the other side is going to be about, so you want to use your keyword and other keyword variations as often as you can. Google and other SEs look at the text closest to a link to decide what it’s about, and in essence, your anchor text is technically the closest text to the link (it IS the link!). You won’t always have the option to use anchor text, but don’t give up an opportunity when one presents itself.

Seven Tips for Onpage SEO

Seven Tips for Onpage SEO

When it comes to onpage SEO, it’s estimated that Google checks up to 200 onpage SEO parameters. And since Google keeps its ranking algorithms a secret, no one really knows what these checks are or even if the estimate is anywhere near correct. But none of that matters when it comes down to it. As long as you can apply a handful of the top onpage SEO strategies, you can get your web pages to rank and draw traffic.

Choose the Right Key Phrase for Onpage SEO

If you want a web page in one of the top ten search engine positions, you need to perform your SEO on a keyword or key phrase that does not have too much competition. You don’t want to take on keywords that the big guys are throwing a lot of money at or ones that too many people are competing for. It’s not that you couldn’t get to page one for these keywords, but achieving, and maintaining, your ranking would be more difficult. First, you want to get to page one, then you want a good chance of staying there.

There is one method of analyzing key phrases that is not foolproof but may give you an edge. Choose keywords and key phrases that match the following criteria:
1. Find key phrases that get more than 1000 searches per month on Google. You can check this using the Google keyword tool.

2. Go to the Google search page and search on your key phrase with the word ‘allintitle:’ in front of it (remember to include the colon). So for the key phrase of ‘yoga poses’ you would use the following search command: allintitle: yoga poses.

3. When the search is entered, look at the top of the Google search screen to see how many pages are returned for that search. The number of pages must be less than 100,000.

This method of keyword analysis is simple and free but suffers from one major drawback. It assesses the competition by finding the number of pages that the search finds. This gives a guideline to the amount of competition for that search term but doesn’t give any indication of the strength of the competition. I don’t know of a simple free way to do that, but there are tools available that can provide that information for a reasonable cost.

Seven Onpage SEO Techniques

Once you have chosen the key phrase that you want your page to rank for, you need to apply some onpage SEO techniques to it. The search engines will look for the pages that best match the search term that the user enters. Hence the need for 1000 searches a month or more. It’s no good optimizing for a search term that no one searches on. Once you know that a fair number of people are searching for your chosen key phrase, you need to make sure your web page makes good use of that key phrase. Here are seven onpage SEO techniques you can use to make sure the search engines take notice of your page for that search term.

1. Purchase a domain name that matches your key phrase. For example, if your key phrase is ‘yoga poses’, the ideal domain name would be yogaposes.com. If you can’t get an exact match, try using hyphens to separate words or add a word as a suffix such as yogaposesexplained.com. You could add a prefix word but suffix words tend to rank better with the search engines.

2. Get your key phrase into the URL of the page. This is already taken care of if your key phrase is in the domain name but you can perform onpage SEO on sub-pages as well. So for instance you might have a URL like yourdomain.com/ yoga-poses.

3. Make sure the keyword appears in the title of the web page and in the meta keywords tag. If you don’t know what this means, you need to make sure your web developer understands your requirement for this. The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be, but it’s still worth using as part of your onpage SEO strategy.

4. Put your keyword into headings. If you can place your keyword into heading text such as heading 1, heading 2, etc, this will highlight it for the search engines. Ideally get your keyword into level 1, level 2 and level 3 headers.

5. Make the keyword stand out. Identify your keyword to search engines by putting it in bold, underline or italic. Search engines regard words with special formatting as important.

6. If you have an image on your web page, put your keyword into the ‘alt’ tag of the image. If you don’t have an image on your web page, it might be worth finding a relevant image for the subject. Not only can you use it for your onpage SEO but it can add interest for the reader.

7. Make your keyword prominent in the first sentence and the last sentence of the text on your web page. The search engines often pay more attention to the beginning and end of the content on your page.

Keyword Density for Onpage SEO

You will want to scatter your key phrase throughout your web page’s content. Keyword density is usually measured as a percentage of the total words on a page. So, if your web page contains 100 words and your key phrase appears three times, your keyword density should be three percent (assuming your key phrase is just one word). You might assume that the higher the keyword density, the better it is for onpage SEO, but this is not necessarily the case. Too high a keyword density will get your page penalized by the search engines. Besides, overloading your content with your key phrase will make your content less readable and therefore less appealing to your readers. There’s no point getting people to your web page just to see them leave again out of boredom or frustration.

A keyword density of around three percent is ideal, but a density anywhere between one and five percent is fine. The caveat to all this is that it should read sensibly so don’t get too hung up on getting exactly three percent. It’s far more important to keep your visitor’s interest so they keep reading. Onpage SEO is there to serve the needs of your website. Don’t make your website a slave to onpage SEO.