Secrets of Keyword Density to Search Engine Marketing (SEO)
Keyword density is one of the major factors that determine the popularity of a website. Compared to the other factors such as the external links that influence the page ranking, keyword density has more relevance in search engine optimization (SEO).
There are three major search engines, viz., Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Among the three, Google alone contributes to 60 percent of the total web traffic whereas the remaining 40 percent is shared between Yahoo! and MSN with small fractions of their share contributed to small players. The three search engines have different algorithm to track the websites for relevant contents. Their criteria differ in calculating the keyword richness of a website.
Keyword density is calculated by dividing the number of repetitions of the keyword by the total number of words in the text. Keyword density is often expressed in percentage. For example if a keyword is repeated 10 times in a 1000-word article, the keyword density of that article is (10/1000)* 100= 1%. The accepted keyword density for Google is 2- 5% whereas that for MSN and Yahoo! is about 10% or higher. This implies that you can never achieve a perfect page ranking from all the three search engines. For Google, the pages with more than 10% keyword density are assumed spam. In fact, the website will bear the brunt if they go for more than 10% keyword density because Google penalize such websites by dropping their page rank to significantly lower values or removing them permanently from the search engine index. Therefore many webmasters are forced to accept Google’s terms of keyword density and to concentrate on other strategies such as the external links for improving the page rank through MSN or Yahoo!.
The selection of keywords is another important matter of concern. Search engines want that the websites contain the keywords that are appropriate to the contents of the website. There are many websites that unethically fill their websites with the most popular key words such as the ‘casino’ ‘Julia Roberts’, etc. Be careful; the search engine algorithms scan your website content to verify the authenticity of the keyword in your website. For example, the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) feature adopted by Google follows a theme-based search for the keyword. Thus it can recognize the appropriateness of the keyword used in the website. The word ‘casino’ should be ideally used in an online gambling website, a night-club’s website, etc. Google spiders will verify the relevance of ‘casino’ by tracing other words or phrases such as ‘Poker’, ‘gambling’, etc., used in the same website. On the other hand, if the keyword ‘casino’ is used in an automobile’s website or a book seller’s website repeatedly for the purpose of attracting the search engines, it will be penalized by the search engine.
In short, the websites with appropriate keyword density would be able to draw the search engine crawlers to them easily. The appropriate key word density finds its relevance only when the keyword itself is appropriate to the content.
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