Hi, I am working as seo since last one and half year and found that my all keywords are doing good in google and msn but not in yahoo. I am using only targeted keywords in my Meta Tags as well as in Title and Text. Those sites which are ranked well in yahoo have more keywords density in their text as well as in meta tags. So high keywords density is good or bad for ranking in yahoo?
I disagree... with my experience in all websites.. all the sites with KW density around 4-5% ranks high in Yahoo.. but for MSN google you need KW density above 8-9% ( if you have good backlink than Density doesn't matter much in google n MSN ) but, ofcourse thats my experience...
Could the reason there is a disagreement in Density for the different engines be because there are Keyword Density tools that measure different parts of the page in different ways? I use a tool that allows you to chose if you want the title, Description and Keyword tags included and if you want image alt tags on or off and you can chose your own stop words or use their list. Using their list of stop words results in different density. I turn off the keyword tag for Google and leave all the other tags on. With this method I managed to bring my site from about #40 to #5 for a major keyword.
It takes time to get in Yahoo SERPS, the solution might be to get more links, you got to remember that folks: It doesnt matter the keyword density of your site if you don't have a good link popularity. All the search engines will mostly take into consideration (by the most important to the less important): 1- The links you got, what types (sitewide, regular, reciprocals) - Yahoo do loves sitewides. 2- THEN comes the keywords density optimization. 2b- The structure of your HTML Site should be SEO Friendly. Yep, World Wide Web Consortium is your friend in that case. 3- The age of your site. So it means that if you don't have the good amount of link back to your site, it doesn't matter whether your optimized your pages for this or that keyword, you'll not appear at all. And forget about those 20% 5%, there are no limits. Think more that your site shouldn't look like a spam, don't use tricky CSS techniques, and remember that visitors will visit your site and it should be written for them and not for Yahoo! Slurp and Googlebot.
After you get imense links, THEN worry about keyword density. If you dont have many links to your site, you will be the last result anyway
From my research it appears that older sites usually rank first in both Google and Yahoo. It's hard to judge the links unless you check them out personally (a few quality links will outdo a lot of low quality links) but at least Yahoo lists the higher quality links first.
I don't believe that much keywords density, I think it's a myth unless you're over 15% which simply doesn't look good.
From experience, there is no magic number when it comes to kw density ; yahoo ranks well even pages with no content or no kw occurence on the page( and keeps them long enough) if they have the right backlinks.
Backlinks, content and age are much more important than kw density, which is something relative anyway.
Keyowrd density can be a plus but is not the key to success... you can have a good keyword density but if you dont have links well you will not go anywhere... and also if you have a low keyword density it will mean that it will have more keywords to rank on google.
Page from one of my site was within first 10 on Yahoo for quite competetive term even it hadn't any external links to it, but it lost its ranking...
Less focus on keyword desity and more on keyword placement. Look at having keywords in places like the title tag and h tags.
Interesting debate. My 2 cents for people that want to learn what's working in an engine. Think about what the hardest terms to rank for are. Buy Viagra, online casino, poker, phentermine, etc. Then go analyze what these guys are doing as they know 100x's more then most of the blow hards on here. Does density make a difference? Absolutely! So I always encourage anyone that wants to learn this stuff to analyze the best. Yeah Yeah I know they use "blackhat" tactics but who cares you'll still learn a lot for your whitehat skills looking at them. I've said it before, most of the people on here don't know that much about seo. Learn from people that have 10-50k domains/sites cause they really know whats working based on lots of testing. As with any scientific study the most important part of the facts and testing are the control. Joe shmo with 3 domains that tried some different stuff had some success has no control and is only speaking out of conjecture. So do your searches for really hard keywords to rank for and see what they're doing. Look at there keyword density, anchor text for links, meta's, etc and you'll learn a lot. Again just my 2 cents. Success, Smaxor
i never give importance to keyword density and never check for keyword density ., Optimize for your users, you will automatically be liked by the engines.,