Keyword Density And Authors - Some Light Remarks on Density

I should have seen it coming. I had asked for feedback on an ebook I had written on Article Marketing. The feedback came with some weak praise together with a remark that I had neglected Keyword Density. I thanked my reviewer and refrained from pointing out that Keyword density had exactly the amount of attention that it deserved - none. I thought no more of it until I got an email from Chris Knight of ezinearticles complaining that many authors were writing articles with an inflated Keyword density.

There's no avoiding it, so here goes.

A keyword is a word or phrase used by people searching for information online with the aid of a search engine. If the keyword phrase is "golf shoes" the search engine scans its database for articles on "golf shoes" then it sorts the articles into an order depending on how relevant they are and then presents them for viewing. So far, so good. The nub of the issue is how the search engine knows what is best.

In the early days it was easy for the search engine to find out what a webpage was about. All it had to do was look at the title and meta description tags on the webpage and then compute the keyword density. Keyword density is just the number of keywords on the page per hundred words. If our shopper found an article on golf shoes 300 words long and the phrase "golf shoes was found 6 times then (6 / 300) x 100 = 2%.

What this gives us is a simple way of working out how important a page is. A webpage that mentions "golf shoes" 10 times is probably going to be more useful to our shopper that a page that mentions "golf shoes" once per 100 words.

I guess it had to happen. Webmasters started "stuffing" keywords into articles with the enthusiasm of a Chef stuffing a turkey. The Keyword density on webpages began to soar and the folk running the search engines were unable to tell which article was best for their users. It was clear that keyword density was less important to the search and it began to be discounted by the search engines.

Google was probably the first to respond to the spamming of the web by what came to be called "keyword stuffing". Predictably some webmasters thought they could outwit Google and started to repeat their keywords dozens of times on the page with, for example, a white typeface on a white background.

While the Quality department at Google were deleting keyword stuffed webpages from their index their colleagues had developed a revolutionary form of advertising called Adsense. A webpage with Adsense on it will display advertisements on it that match the content of the page. So a page with an article about the best shoes to wear while playing golf will show Adsense advertisements on golf shoes.

The implications of this are that Google can judge for itself what the page is about. It does not need to read the meta tags and does not need to work out the keyword density.

Consequently Google started to discount meta tags and keyword density.

Many webmasters persisted with their folly in spite of explanations from Search Engine experts such as Aaron Wall, Jill Whalen and Colin McDougall.

Instead of counting keywords Google is looking at the relationships between the words. There is a natural structure in language and a well constructed and informative article would be expected to have a variety of words relevant to a topic as well as a smattering of technical terms and slang.

Writing in a natural way is the only way to get the word relationships Google is looking for in its quest for high quality and writing to target a particular keyword density is an effective way to tell Google that the article concerned is of little value.

The search engines have been telling us for years to write for our visitors and not for the search engines. For years we have been ignoring this advice but the search technology now in place is so good that deliberately trying to rank in the search results by artificial means is self defeating.

And that is why my book did not feature keyword density!

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