How important is Keyword Density for Search Engine Optimization?

So how important is Keyword Density? To start of with, it is not 1998 anymore and keyword density has become a fairly meaningless for search engine optimization. About the only useful thing now about using a keyword analysis tool is to see what your competitor’s websites are using for keyword phrases that you may not have though about.

Here are some Search Engine tips for 2010:

• Their is little question that the Search engines may place significant weight on domain age, site authority, link anchor text and usage data.
• The page title and 1st paragraph is typically weighted more than most any other text on the page.
• The meta keywords tags, comments tags, and other somewhat hidden inputs are now given less weight than page copy.
• Pages that have lots of bold in text, linked, or in a heading tag is likely given greater weighting than normal text.
• Weights are relative. If your whole page is in an H1 tag that looks shady, and it does not place more weight on any of the text since all the page copy is in it.
• You probably want to avoid doing things like bolding H1 text as it is doubtful it will make a page seem any more relevant.
• Lots are queries are a bit random in nature. When people tweak up page copy for an arbitrarily higher keyword density they typically end up removing some of the modifier terms that were helping the page appear relevant for many 3 and 4 word search queries.
• Semantic related algorithms, may look at supporting vocabulary when determining the relevancy of a page. If you pulled the keyword phrase you were targeting out of your page copy would it still be easy for a search engine to mathematically model what that phrase was and what your page is about given the supporting text?
• When people focus too much on keyword density they tend to write content which people would not be interested in reading or linking at.

There are many tools that you can use online to research great keyphrases to use for your titles and one that we use and recommend is SEMRush.com. The new tool for Search Engine Marketing. A US database of some 25 000 000 keywords. Learn everything about your competitors!

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