Wirral and Liverpool Directory

Keywords are Important

The first search engine optimisation topic most people come across is meta tag creation. Creating the right meta information is the be all and end all of traffic building as far as many webmasters are concerned. Although there are many other areas we consider to be equally important - link popularity, site navigation issues to name just two, successful meta tag creation is still fundamental to the search engine optimisation process.

We have already covered the meta information basics in another Bytestart article, but one area - Keyword Density (also known as Keyword Frequency), warrants an article of its own. Meta Information provides the "shop window" to a website - the Title, for example, is the first thing punters will see when they do a Google search, so it is important to make this tag readable and attractive, without trying to over-optimise it with your chosen keywords. Same goes with the Description tag.

Search engines will take your meta information as a guide to what your website is about. From these snippets of code, the crawlers will determine how relevant the content of a given page is to the meta information you have programmed in the header code. It is therefore important to ensure your keywords appear an optimum number of times within the page in question, without overdoing it.

To rank highly for a given keyword/keyword phrase, your keyword density (keyword frequency) should not be too high or too low. Too high and your page may be deemed as a spammers creation, and penalised. Too low, and the engines will think your content is unrelated to the keywords you have programmed, and rank lowly.

Gone are the "good old days" we remember fondly, when you could create a large number of keyword-rich pages and submit them to the likes of Altavista for a Top 10 ranking. Search engines are wise to this now - they are intolerant of such attempts to skew results. The only way to ensure a good ranking (in a meta sense) is to produce quality content-rich pages, which are genuinely related to the overall subject area you specialise in. In this content, ensure you repeat your prime keyword phrases, but at the same time ensure that the readability of any content isn't compromised by your search engine optimisation effort!

Keyword Density algorithms will vary from engine to engine. What page text is indexed will also vary. But, fundamentally, if your keyword (or phrase) occurs 5 times in every 100 words viewed by an engine, your keyword density will be 5%.

According to Search Enginewatch in an excellent article on How Search Engines Rank Web Pages, "Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning."

This, once again backs up the theory that good sites, with good relevant content will always do better than sites setup purely to generate traffic in their own right.

Many "experts" would recommend a keyword frequency of between 3 and 7% (i.e. the keyword would appear between 3 and 7 times per 100 words in the document). In reality, you won't be able to optimise every single page of your site so precisely, however this is a general guide used by many web marketing people.

It would seem the key way to ensure good density would be to ensure that your meta information matches the content of your pages, rather than copy & pasting or rushing the meta creation stage of web publishing. Don't try to spam the engines by submitting content-low pages full of keywords, and don't try to change articles/content too much purely to try and optimise every page for keywords. You want your content to be readable at the same time - it's a matter of "give and take".

Take a look at the keyword density of this page, for example on the keyword density analyser recommended below. Hopefully it is a readable article, but the meta information has been primed according to the content - not the other way round. A quick analysis using the tool below shows the phrases we wanted to promote (keyword density, keyword frequency, etc.) are around the 5% mark. This seems about right, although a mildly higher one would do no harm at all since the content is obviously related to the subject matter.

Naturally, to work out the keyword density of a page cannot be done easily "by hand", so we recommend the Keyword Density Analyser at SearchEngineWorld. We should also have our own tools up shortly.