Keywords are the words and phrases that people are using in their searches. Some keywords are being searched for by thousands of people a day. Tools such as Google’s zeitgeist look at the popular words month by month.
Whilst researching on the topic of keywords, I found as I always do when reading about SEO so many opposing views that it is very hard to make sense of it all. I read on one site that anything higher than 2% keyword density (the number of times your keyword appears on the page as a percentage of the total words on the page) is considered spam by Google yet other sites recommend a density of 2-7%. It is all very confusing.
One thing my common sense tells me is that the placement of keywords has to make sense to the reader. You should write your copy with your readers not the search engines in mind. After all what is the point of having a page that ranks highly in the search engines of no-one stays on your page for more than a few seconds? Write your copy with no heed for keywords and then when you are finished, if you can see a couple of places where your keywords could fit in without disrupting the flow then by all means fit them in. Some experts recommend making sure a keyword is near the beginning and near the end but again this is hotly contended.
In summary then, make your copy relevant to your readers and do not worry overly with keywords or keywords density. As the SEO & Blog Guy Roy Montero says “The search engines don’t care as much about what YOU say about your page as they do about what OTHER PEOPLE say about your page.” In other words focus more on getting those links to your pages rather than spend a whole lot of time worrying about SEO on your page.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Joyce Aldawood // Jan 23, 2009 at 11:32 pm
What you have to say about SEO makes a whole lot of sense to me. I have been working very hard for the past three years to get our web site noticed. And this year, when you put “custom jewelry design” into the google space- our website comes up at the top of the second page. I am working on getting us onto the first page. I know that it takes time and hard work to get this done. I also wrote an informative article that is on our web site which contains many key words that people might be using.
2 katehudson // Jun 16, 2009 at 2:10 pm
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.