The web is all about content. Finding success in the search industry is about presenting the right content to the right user at the right time. How do they do that? Keywords!
There is no denying that all of the popular search engines available today have come a long way from simply counting links and words on pages.
Images, videos, PDF files, flash, and other rich media are also indexed these days alongside text-based pages … but the fact is, users are still searching with keywords. This is why it is important not to drop the ball when it comes to keyword strategy and optimization of every element on every page.
There’s a lot more to optimization these days than just making sure enough keywords appear on one page.
Debunking the myth: there is an optimal keyword density
Be very suspicious of SEOs who tell you that the correct keyword density for a keyword is between 3% and 8% (or whatever percentage for that matter). This is simply not true.
Naturally, you can’t expect to rank for a keyword or keyphrase if it doesn’t appear anywhere on your site. However, high keyword volume is not the secret to a good ranking.
Many optimization specialists recognize that keyword densities do not influence the way commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weights to keywords.
In fact, keyword density says nothing about a document’s relevance to a search. It is completely separate from the quality or semantics of a document and is therefore relevant to a specific topic.
Search engines use complex algorithms with a series of weighted variables to calculate the ranking of sites in relation to a specific search term. In fact, in any type of automated information retrieval or text extraction, a weighting system is used.
It’s actually more about weighting than repeating.
This weight is more commonly presented as a tf-idf weight (inverse document frequency-frequency term). It is a statistical measure that evaluates the importance of a word for a document or a corpus of information.
The basic principle is that the importance of a given word increases in proportion to the number of times the word appears in a document; however, this is offset by the number of times the word appears in the corpus or body of the documents.
Hence, tf-idf is a fairly efficient way to rank the relevance of a page for a given user query.
Know your corpus
What does this mean for your content? Well, when considering the frequency of a keyword in a document, the best approach from a strategic point of view is to try to be as natural as possible.
In other words, if you are trying to optimize your page for “PVC paint,” you should consider what the normal frequency of use of that word is on pages that rank well for a search for that phrase.
Naturally, when it comes to ordering pages in search engine results pages, tf-idf weight is not the only variable considered in the algorithm, and aspects such as latent semantic indexing certainly play a critical role in determining the relevance of a document to a search term. too.
Unfortunately, because no SEO has knowledge of the exact mechanics and details of any search engine’s algorithms, the most they can do is live to be the least imperfect.
Keyword strategy is still important
This does not negate the importance of having a proper keyword strategy in place, including thorough keyword research and assignment.
Targeting is a very important part of any keyword strategy. You must have a clear structure for your human visitors and search engine bots. Think carefully about your topic and create focused, relevant and original content around those areas.
The bottom line is that websites that are clearly structured consistently outperform those that are not, even if they cover similar topics.
Some final points
There is too much danger of being tagged as a spammer if you stuff your content with keywords. Stay away from black hat SEO tactics, like hidden text, and try to keep things natural.
It is always better to keep the user in mind when writing content. The natural use of words, strong information architecture, and unique content are sure to pay dividends in the end.
