After many “Google Updates” people began to realize that certain SEO practices are not working as good as they did in the past. One of the extensively discussed topics among webmasters when it comes to article and document indexing are:
LSI (Latent Semantic indexing)
KD (Keyword Density)
The one I’m going to talk about is Keyword Density.
As Defined by Wikipedia:
Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keyword stuffing.
Webmasters optimize their information using the concept of Keyword Density in order to show the search engines such information is relevant to a certain topic or keyword. In other words, a keyword is repeated several times throughout the article body making the document more relevant to such term.
While this concept is important, many people “over optimize” their articles using a particular set of keywords or key-phrases and they end up with a ridiculous looking article. Why ridiculous?, well the fact that a word is repeated over and over in a relatively short excerpt creates a bad impression about the writer. I have read a great number of articles which had an interesting title but were completely destroyed by the constant repetition of words.
As described by KD researcher Dr. Garcia:
this overall ratio [Keyword Density] tells us nothing about:
- the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)
- where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
- the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)
- the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents
Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics and relevancy
The Solution to Keyword Density Problems
The solution to this problem is fairly simple. Focus on creating content “relevant to the article title” without thinking about the term you want to optimize the article for.
Many people think too much about KD and completely neglect to optimize the most important part of the article: “The Title!“.
Just stop and think for a moment, if you want to optimize an article for the key-phrase “Free online videos”, then include that particular set of words in the article title!. You will use the phrase “Free online videos” throughout the article body because the number of times a word is used under normal circumstances suggests that it is part of the of the topic.
Now, if you are obsessive-compulsive like myself, you can get down to the KD equation level by reading this article.
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