Keyword density vs spam

Hi,

I've been giving some SEO advice to the owner of arubahaystack.com/ and I was wondering if the keyword "aruba" isn't overused ...

Like you can see, the keyword is in about every link now because his pages didn't rank well before ( they rank better now but still not the way he wants ).

My question, what's the max keyword density before you can start about SE spam. ? The max keyword density I've found on 1 page was about 11%.

 

95 out of 835 words on this page is 11.3%.

I don't think it matters. Increasing or decreasing it has only such a marginal effect, I'd rather worry about IBLs.

Judging from the title, the home page is targeted for 4 different keypharses.

I think that's wrong. Just name it Aruba or just one phrase including Aruba. Not 4. Build specific pages for the remaining ones. The site has good PR from just 29 reported links. Are you sure the anchor text is all correct? You should be able to get more out of that.

The individual pages seem to be optimised really well as far as on-page is concerned. They don't show any incoming links though. Not even internal. You might want to work on that too.

The English site doesn't seem to optimized for any of the big KWs suggested by Overture. That might be the reason of poor traffic. The translation from Nederlands to English is done pretty poor I have to say. The English site is full of errors. (Will make it hard for SE's to get the gist of it.)

Pages like Aruba Weather don't seem SEO'ed very well either. Title too long, no short H tags with just that keyword.

There are no links coming in to the English site either.

Just some thoughts. I don't think it's the density bugging your client.

 

Thanks for checking the site TOPS3O,

I'll make him change the title from the homepage.

No internal incoming links is impossible, all these pages got a PR3/4 from the homepage and every page links to every page. How did you check this, with the link command ?
Google only shows backlinks from very low PR pages so maybe that's why it's not r'eporting backlinks but they are there for sure.

The english part is very very badly optimized because the guy doesn't know english and he doesn't want to pay to have someone translate it.

Each english page gets linked from their dutch (nederlands) equivalent page so they do have incominglinks ( might be better to change the keywords for those links though )

 

Yes I did use the link command, hence saying links reported. But no links reported is a good indication there aren't enough to justify descent ranking.

I like the site design a lot by the way. Fits the theme really well. A good friend of mine lived there a few months and is going back there for good. I'd love to go one day too.

I'll translate the pages for commission on sales / free accomodation and flights if he's too tight to pay up front. I'm Dutch and live in the UK and do SEO so I guess my CV fits.

 

I'm not sure I agree with that...

Google's results are so screwy at the moment that I wouldn't trust anything it says... (In terms of link: at least)...

 

TOPS3O, I'll ask him if he's interested in a translation.