Website Keyword Density: The Holy Grail is in your Authenticity
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | No Comments
An article published today on SEO keyword density raises, yet again, one of the eternal questions asked by website owners: “What is the most effective balance of keywords within a given page of a site?”
The article refers to the widely-held belief that the perfect keyword density on a web page is 2-4%. That sounds about as good of a range as any. Yet, for as long as there has been SEO, search engines, and definitely since Al Gore invented the internet, webmasters and so-called gurus of search have been guilty of landing so far away from that right balance that they either do themselves no good by having ZERO relevant keywords, or, using such an ungodly amount they they get de-indexed by Google and the like. That eternal quest for the right balance is perhaps easier to achieve than you may think… not to say there is one definitive solution, but there are some concepts that will help you get closer to that Holy Grail than where you may be now.
Let’s start, briefly, with the basics. What makes up an effective website? Most often, unless it’s a site that needs to be heavy in images, the primary driver of good usability and being search-friendly is CONTENT. Content, while a vague word in some ways, is largely the copy you post on your website. After all, your visitors come to your site to learn about you, and what better way to do that than to spell out clearly who you are and what you do. You can’t often do that with images alone. So, when thinking of content, site owners need to place themselves in their visitors shoes and ask one basic question:
“If I were my site visitor, what would I want to learn about me or my company?”
Way too often, that essential question gets overlooked in the face of the easier question for website owners to answer, which is. “What do I want to tell my site visitors about me or my company?” Easy, I say, because we get so neck-deep into touting our business and why we’re the best, forgetting the wants and needs of the site visitor’s pursuit of their own questions. Taking the step of researching what your potential customers’ want to take away from visiting your site will lead into…
Effective, Authentic Site Copy!
On each page of your site, likely there is one dominant topic. If I am in advertising, I may be one page dedicated to each of the varieties of advertising I offer. And if you of what you speak, you should have no trouble writing authentic, flowing copy that, does not require you to force keywords into your copy. If you insert keywords into your site pages where they don’t really fit, just for the sake of artifically beefing up your page copy like some juiced up athlete trying to gain an advantage, you’ll be a big ol’ loser in the end. This is because search engine algorithms are keen to those tricks, and will kick you off of the island as swiftly as the sad folk who are voted off Survivor in the season’s first episode. When you are authentic, write your copy with your target audience top of mind (YOU aren’t as important as you think you are!), your keywords will fall into place naturally. This is not a perfect rule, but often it’ll get you at least about 80% of the way there… farther than perhaps any of your competitors.
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