How to Utilize Keywords and Keyword Density

Any web developer or web article writer needs to have a firm grasp of exactly what keywords are and what keyword density is, in order to get good search engine and directory placement. Many people understand that quality content is important, but what good is quality content if no one can find it? That's what keywords do for you, help your readers find your content.

Keywords are help your readers or site viewers find your site or content. What you need to do, in order to get page hits for whatever you want your viewers to read, is figure out exactly what phrases or words your readers might use in order to search for the type of information you have. But more importantly, you don't want to use popular words that everyone would be using in their articles, because then you are competing with all the other articles and sites out there writing about the same thing.

Let me explain. If you are writing an article about cooking, using the keyword 'cooking' would not really get you high rankings in search engines, because 1) it's a common word, and 2) every other article about cooking and every other site about cooking will be using that keyword too.

So let's look at what your content is really about. Perhaps you are writing an article about cooking with jalapeno peppers - well, there's one of your potential search phrases right there. Chances are, that would be your title, or at least part of your title, of the article or the webpage you are building pertaining to 'cooking with jalapeno peppers.'

Now, that is a keyword phrase, and each one of those words, with the exception of the word 'with,' will also be individual keywords. Let's look at the Google Search Engine results page for 'cooking with jalapeno peppers.' Right CLICK HERE and open this link in a new page, in order to open the search results page so you can follow along.

The first thing you should note is that the word 'with' will not be searched for unless it is found in the exact phrase 'cooking with jalapeno peppers.' In the search results, you will see the keywords from your search either highlighted or bolded, so you can see the relevancy of the listing. The reason for this is because, outside of the keyword phrase, 'with' is not an index-able word.

Other words that are typically not index-able are: a, at, in, on, of, for, and (with exceptions), or (with exceptions), the (with exceptions), is (with exceptions), but, not (with exceptions), and a few others not listed here, including sometimes obscure acronyms and oftentimes, numbers when written numerically and not longhand.

Now, the exceptions above are sometimes included in searches, but not usually as keywords. For example, when performing a Boolean Search, and-or-but-not all have a meaning.

Okay, so back to our example: cooking with jalapeno peppers.

As you can see from the search page I provided, and I can't point them out to you by item listing, because search indexes can indeed change daily, but what you should be able to see is that the highlighted or bolded words from your search string 'cooking with jalapeno peppers' are most likely going to be the individual index-able words: cooking, jalapeno, peppers.

But, besides having the keyword phrase: cooking with jalapeno peppers - and the individual keywords, you also have another common search string phrase: jalapeno peppers.

So your Google Search for the example phrase will result in several 'hits' for websites with a high concentration of any of the following:

• "Cooking with jalapeno peppers"
  
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• Cooking, jalapeno, peppers
  
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• Cooking, "jalapeno peppers", jalapeno, peppers
  
• 
  

And you might also get returns for the word 'pepper' and not just 'peppers'.

So what does all this mean to you when writing your article?

Okay, to make your article receive good placement for its topic, you want to not only use index-able and searchable keywords and phrases in your article title (and your page's title if you are building a webpage), but you also want to use these words frequently within the body of your text, to get proper search engine optimization (SEO).

There is some debate about how many keywords should be used in an article or on web content in order to get good SEO. Some will argue that the more the better, but here recently, Google and other indexers, search engines, and directories consider it 'keyword stuffing' if your keyword percentage is too high. How high is too high is a gamble, because no one seems to know for sure.

Robots scan your site, not human beings, and these robots really can't tell if your content is quality or just a page of random words. Therefore, an algorithm is used to determine the 'quality' of your content versus your keywords. What these robots do is scan your text (they can't scan images and most other things), and they count how many index-able words appear on your page. After these robots have the number of index-able words on your page, they count the words or phrases that are used most often on the page.

Once they have these figures, they determine a percentage of keyword saturation. That is, what is the percentage of times that keyword or keyword phrase is used in comparison to the total number of index-able words.

For example, out of 1000 index-able words, if your keyword phrase appears 50 times, then you have a keyword SEO percentage for that keyword density of 5%. Most search engines seem to like keyword density between 2-8%, many web publishers hire freelance writers for keyword density of 10-15%, and most experts agree that if you go over that, you will probably be decreased in ranking due to keyword stuffing.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that this works on any repeated word or phrase, even if you did not intend to use it as a keyword or keyword phrase. I'll give you an example. For this article, the word: 'keyword' and the phrase 'keyword phrase' are probably the two keywords I would have picked for this article. After completing the article and running it through a keyword density analyzer, I discovered that my keyword density for these two phrases is:

• Keyword = 3.12%
  
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• Keyword phrase = 1.02% (a little low)
  
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• Keyword density = 1.55%
  
• 
  

Which is right on target, but what I also discovered is that there are other keywords that were picked up in this article that I wouldn't have picked. For example, in the beginning, I wrote a lot about cooking and jalapeno peppers. Now, imagine that someone was searching for cooking and jalapeno peppers and came to this article and found it was about keyword density.

I did this on purpose to prove a point. What I should have done with this article was used an example that had similar content and information as to what my article was about: keywords and keyword phrases. Instead, I wrote an article using the example of "cooking with jalapeno peppers" and in return, here's the keyword density analyzer tool for the following:

• Jalapeno peppers = 2.18%
  
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• Cooking with jalapeno peppers = 2.32%
  
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• Cooking = 1.09%
  
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As you can see, my example phrases did almost as well on the keyword density as the phrases I was hoping would index for this article. Of course, there's another issue called 'prominence' where my keyword phrases and keywords I have chosen have a higher prominence than the phrases of my example, but that's for another article.

Now the reason I did it this way was to make a point. When writing content articles, like the ones you will find on Associated Content, you need to be sure that you are writing to your target audience and that the keywords you choose relate to the content you are writing, but more than that, make sure you are not accidentally indexing keywords in your article that have nothing to do with the topic of your article - like cooking with jalapeno peppers has nothing to do with keyword density.

When you do this, readers come to your site, read your article, and are disappointed that it does not contain the information they thought they would find. In the future, if the reader sees our articles consistently don't index properly for their topics, they may stop reading you altogether.

And there you have the basic of keyword density and SEO for writing articles and web content.