Is Keyword Density Still Important?
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 6:16 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
Many years ago, before Google was important (can you remember back that far?), it was thought that the more keywords you had on a page, the better your search engine ranking would be.
That’s not the case anymore.
Because search engines can not check every page of a site, and developers get tired of spammers hiding keywords in the background (or in tiny print, or any other Black Hat way they could use to get rated high), keyword density became less important.
Keyword “positioning”, however, is very important.
Keyword positioning is placing the keywords in the title tags and header tags, as well as making sure they are related to your website’s main theme or niche. This is now far more important than how many keywords you have on the entire page.
Many of the website builder software on the market today know about this new rule. They usually design the software so you will have a way to check your positioning (or the program will tell you what it is). Here are some general guidelines to follow when you are building your pages:
- Your main keyword phrase should appear at least once in the page title or in the website title.
- The keyword should appear at least once in your page description.
- The total number of keywords should be less than 20 (on any single page).
- The keyword should appear at least once in the headings on your page, and at least once in the alt text of images on your page (which means you should give any images you are using names that use your keyword).
- Have keyword density of at least 1% on the top third of your body.
- Have keyword density of at least 0.5% in the body text as a whole.
- The total number of words in the body should be greater than 500.
Notice that it doesn’t matter anymore if you have a keyword list in your “keyword meta tag.” That went away last year sometime.
So, for now, it’s better if you concentrate on:
1) giving readers good, useful, quality content;
2) pay attention to keyword positioning, and…
3) make sure your keywords are relevant to your website’s theme.
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