Article SEO - Keywords Are Essential

Keyword density and placement is very important in SEO. The search engines send out spiders, whose job is to take your keywords from your online content or articles, and run back and tell the search engines what they are. This is one tattle tail that you want to let tattle, because they can drive so much traffic your way that it is ridiculous. So it is important that you make it as easy as possible for the spiders to pick out those keywords.

What the heck is a keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword. So you want to make sure that you are researching your keywords properly using a keyword tool of some sort. You can find some pretty good keyword tools that are free if you just do a little research.

Don't overdo you SEO.

While it is important for you to make sure that your articles are optimized for the search engines, it is just as important that you avoid over optimization. A common term for over optimization is "keyword stuffing." That's when you literally stuff keywords in your articles and the spiders catch on to it. Although they are not real spiders, those things are smart! If a spider thinks you are stuffing keywords it will think that you are trying to trick it into giving your better search engine rankings and will end up penalizing you instead.

Understanding Keyword Density

In a nutshell, keyword density is how many times your keyword appears throughout your article. Many of the SEO gurus use a percentage to determine how many times a keyword should appear. For example, if your article is 400 words long and you want to have a keyword density of 5% then your keyword needs to appear in your article 20 times. There are a lot of resources out there that will explain keyword density in further detail. So make sure you have a clear understanding of this before you start putting keywords in your articles.

What's the Right Density?

You will find that there are different opinions on what the right density is. But regardless of what density you use, it is important to make sure more of your keywords are placed in the beginning half of your article. Getting the right keyword density takes a little bit of research and practice, but once you get the hang of it then the sky is the limit for traffic and potential earnings.