Is Keyword Density Relevent anymore?

A number of years ago no one asked “Is Keyword Density relevant anymore”?. It was a given. It was an art. but a lot has changed in the last few years and keyword density, measuring keyword density, keyword density tools, well they just aren’t as important as they used to be.

Must Know Summary:

Keyword density is measured as a percentage. It represents what percentage of your articles or web pages total word count contains your keyword phrase. But advances in search engine capabilities and things like Latent Semantics indexing may be decreasing the value of Keyword Density Optimization!

Is Keyword density Relevent anymore?

What is more important then Keyword Density? Well here is my short list and then we will list an analysis done by Dr. E. Garcia on the topic of “Is Keyword Density” a good measure?  But first here is my list of the first 3 things that come to mind in what is more important then Keyword density:

1) Doing hi quality keyword research is far more important.

• Identify those Keywords that are relevent to your Niche, to your Website, to your current page and to your readers.
• Identify the subset of those keywords that you have an opportunity to rank on based upon competition
• Use a quality Keyword Software tool liketo help you do all of this. They are automated, wholistic and give you a competitive edge over people using just the google keyword tool.Your traffic depends on it.

2) Keyword Placement is far more important then is Keyword Density. Click here to read our article on the top 12 WordPress SEO tips that deals a lot with Keyword Placement.

3) Quality of articles and readability and navigation of the website is far more important then is keyword density (UNLESS your website is a 1 page sales letter / splash page aimed at affiliate marketing. Then 1 and 2 above still apply as king of the hill).

4) Having a web page or post that:

• IS the subject of one consistant wholistic keyword phrase. Google is good enough now to analyze the content and determine the keyword phrase.If your content doesn’t loggically align with the title and header then its not going to fool Google even if you stuff it full of keywords.
• HAS the on page SEO. Have the phrase in the H1, H2 and H3 headings, Have it highlighted in bold at the start and end of the article. You can click on this link to read our article on the Clickbump SEO on page SEO tool to help with this critical task.
• Has backlinks to the page with the keyword phrase as the anchor text for the back links. You can click on this link to read our review of the best automated backlinks plugin there is.

Dr. E. Garcia explained why keyword density was a bad measure of relevancy in The Keyword Density of Non Sense.

• Search engines may place significant weight on domain age, site authority, link anchor text and usage data.
• The page title is typically weighted more than most any other text on the page.
• The meta keywords tags, comments tags, and other somewhat hidden inputs may be given less weight than page copy.
• Page copy which is bolded, 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.

OK thats it for this Is Keyword density Relevent anymore? article!

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