The Lowdown on Keywords
Keywords are an essential part of Search engine optimization. In web master forums and places where a call for writers is rampant, you’ll see web masters asking for search engine optimized articles all the time. Keywords, as time went by, became key phrases to better capture the nature of the human audience who type in not only keywords but also phrases as search engine queries. Keywords are essential for your web site to rank in the SERPs. When spiders crawl your site, you need to show them what your web site is about. Unlike humans, these bots don’t have the higher intellect to comprehend what you blog about if you don’t mention it a few times in your content.
For every keyword or key phrase you want to target, you need content that is optimized for search engines revolving around it. Basically, you need an article with a set number of words infused with a defined keyword density. How does one keyword density anyway? Simple. For one article, list all the keywords you want to target. Now, count every keyword or key phrase targeted and then divide it by the number of words. So, for example, the targeted keyword was mentioned 10 times in a 500-word article:
10 / 500 = 0.02
Move the decimal two places to the right and that is your percentage. So for this example, the keyword density is 2%. Perform this computation for every single keyword you are targeting.
Google has a preference for a 1 - 2% keyword density. Anything over than that could make the Googlebot think you’re spamming, increases the risk of Google de-ranking your web site and consequently, throwing you to the supplemental index. Yahoo, on the other hand, has a preference for a 7 - 10% keyword density. The Yahoo bot, however, can recognize subtle differences in the keyword so you can create alternatives of the main keyword and use that.
