Why Focusing on Keyword Density

Why Focusing on Keyword Density

Why Focusing on Keyword Densityis a Waste of Time

About half of all search queries are unique. Many of the searches that bring visitors to your sites are for keyword phrases you never would have guessed. If a site is not well-established, most search traffic will be for long, multiword search phrases.

When webmasters start thinking about keyword density, many of them tend to remove descriptive modifiers and other semantically-related terms. Since some of those terms will no longer appear on the page, the “optimized” site no longer ranks well for many queries.

People write, search, and use language in similar ways. Thus, if you write naturally, you are going to be far better optimized for long-tail searches than some person who wastes time on keyword density will be.

If the content sounds like it was designed for engines instead of people, then less people are going to want to read it or link to it.

Internal-Speak

A major cell phone company refuses to use the terms cellular phone or cell phone on their site because, in their words, “We don’t just sell analog phones, we sell digital phones as well. ‘Cellular’ is old technology.” In engineering-speak, ‛cellular phone’ is a phone that uses ‘cell towers’ to move voice back and forth via analog frequencies. They didn’t seem to understand that most customers refer to their mobile phone as a ‘cell phone’ or ‘cellular phone,’ and they don’t give a rip about the technology that makes the phone work.

Make sure you research how customers search. Do not rely on what the company prefers to call things.

Finding Keywords

There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are the following:

•       Words people would search for to find your product

•       Results from data mining your site-level search information if you have a site-level search.

•     Mind map problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service (even if they do not know you exist)

•       Keyword tags on competitors’ websites

•       Visible page copy on competitors’ websites

•       Related search suggestions on large search engines (such as Ask or Yahoo!)

•       Related term suggestions at smaller engines such as Gigablast, Vivisimo, Become.com,  and Snap

•    Keyword groupings via tools such as Google Sets or the MSN clustering technology preview

•      Lexical FreeNet: helps find related terms and ideas using a large database of related terms (this is well beyond the scope of needs for most people trying to do SEO)

•       Tag Cloud: Tag Cloud is a free folksonomy tool showing related terms. If your product name or brand are related to other common terms in your market, then you are doing a good job working your brand into the semantic language. For example, when I search Yahoo! for seo book, sometimes they show a see also result for seo book aaron. Sometimes Yahoo! recommends seo book when I search for seo.

•       Keyword suggestion tools, which are covered in the next section