The web is all about content. Finding success in the search industry is all about getting the right content in front of 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, flash and other rich media are also being indexed these days along with text based pages… but the fact is that users still search using keywords. This is why it is important not to lose control when it comes to keyword strategy and optimization for each element on each page.
There’s a lot more to optimization these days than just making sure enough keywords appear on a 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 key phrase is between 3% and 8% (or any percentage). 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, the high volume of keywords is not the secret to a good ranking.
Many optimization specialists acknowledge that keyword densities play no role in how commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weight to keywords.
In fact, keyword density says nothing about the relevance of a document to a search. It is completely independent of the quality or semantics of a document and therefore its relevance 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 mining, a weighting system is used.
Actually, it is more about pondering than repeating.
This weight is most commonly presented as a tf-idf (inverse document frequency-term frequency) weight. This is a statistical measure that assesses how important a word is to a document or a corpus of information.
The basic principle is that the importance of any given word increases proportionally 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 documents.
So tf-idf is a pretty efficient way to rank a page’s relevance to 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 look to be as natural as possible.
In other words, if you’re 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 undoubtedly play a fundamental role in the ranking. determining the relevance of a document for a search term. also.
Unfortunately, since no SEO has any knowledge of the exact mechanics and specifications of any search engine’s algorithms, the most they can do is strive to be the least imperfect.
Keyword Strategy Is Still Important
This is not to 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 need to have a clear structure for both 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: websites that are clearly structured consistently outperform those that are not, even if they cover a similar topic.
some closing points
There is too much danger of being labeled 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. Natural use of words, strong information architecture, and unique content will certainly pay off in the end.