Hey guys, Please, please sticky this thread so we can stop the stupid "what is the perfect keyword density" threads.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While it used to be the case that the more times you had a keyphrase written on the page, it certainly doesn't apply now. Take this page text (we're optimising for the word SAAB): The SAAB dealer network and SAAB buying public received a boost today as a new website was launched to help customers locate all the information they would ever need about SAAB from finding Used SAAB cars online to locating there local SAAB garage. Read it aloud and you'll immediately notice it doesn't sound natural & actually sounds quite "spammy". The search engines realise this too! Nowadays it is a much better approach to write content so that it sounds natural to a human reader. After all, you're making the site for humans aren't you? This onpage text is a much better: A new website was launched today aimed at the SAAB dealer network & buying public. The site aims to help dealers & customers locate all available information on any SAAB products or services, including Used cars or local garages. In extreme cases sites have even been known to be penalised by Google as the search engine sees these pages as having very little value due to the fact that they sound so spammy ... and they'd probably be correct 99% of the time! Best Practice: Always design & right your page primarily for human consumption. There is no reason why you can't include your keyphrases in the text, but keyword density (that is, the number of times a keyword appears in the text) now has no relevance to search engine positioning. Semantics As more people become aware of the importance of being listed at the top of Google (and other search engines) within their industry, the fight for those 10 top spots becomes increasingly difficult. Search engines are (and will continue to rely more and more heavily on) semantics of onpage text. That is to say, they analyse the text as a whole and they decide the relevance. Take the following words for example: * Lawnmowers * Lawnmower * Mower * Mowing * Mowing * Mow * Lawn * Grass * Green A human would easily recognise that these words are related and that if they were on the same page then that page is about mowing a lawn with a lawnmower perhaps with sections about the grass & how you shouldn't mow grass that isn't green. Search engines used to just see a collection of random words however now research suggests that they are recognising the relationships between words & that it doesn't necessarily make the page less relevant to the keyword lawnmowers just by having the words green & grass there too ... in fact it could make it more relevant & crucially - a better information source (which is what the search engines strive to rank at the top. Best Practice: Don't focus too heavily on your keywords, right natural content & don't be afraid to use related words .... as show above it'll probably help rather than hinder you! Original Blog Post: Keyword Density & SEO Copywriting
Good post there Try using Google External Keyword tools, as it also give list of keywords, which you can choose.