Right, so now you’ve used our top 5 tips for finding the right keywords, I bet you’re wondering what you do with them! Just like good old Goldilocks, you need to make sure that you get it just right.
Too much and you can hurt your search engine rankings. But too little, and it be equally as detrimental as the search engines won’t pay attention to you.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a webpage, compared to the total number of words on the page. And for SEO purposes, keyword density is a factor used to determine if your webpage is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.
Finding the right balance
Back in the old days (aka the late 90s!), keywords were all the rage and it was all about including them as many times as you could to help your page rank well.
But that didn’t last long and nowadays, it’s a completely different ball game. Overuse your keywords and your site can be penalised.
The key to keyword density is definitely balance. You need to make sure you have valuable content that looks natural at the same time – so you want your keywords to be carefully, creatively and casually woven throughout. This not only maximizes your SEO efforts, but also makes sure you have a high level of legitimacy and creates a quality site for your customers and visitors.
While opinions amongst SEO experts vary, a good balance for keyword density is roughly 3% to 5% of your website content.
Any less than that and your ranking may fall. Any more than that, and your site may be flagged.
Here’s an example of the keyword balancing act, where a sentence effectively and naturally applies the keyword “website design” within its website content:
“Our agency specialises in quality website design with a focus on branding, SEO and customer acquisition.”
This on the other hand is a great example of well and truly overdoing it:
“Our website design agency specialises in quality website design with a focus on branding, SEO and customer acquisition for website design.”
Can you see the difference?
In the second example, the keyword is forced and overused, making it difficult to read the sentence and giving you a good chance of being red flagged by search engines for “keyword loading”.
In other words, the search engines won’t trust you – they’ll most likely “think” you’re not a legitimate business and are only out to acquire site visitors rather than actual customers. Not a good idea for growing your business!
So how do you do it yourself?
Making sure your pages look natural by weaving keywords into the content in an organic way can be a bit tricky.
A good way to do this is to actually write each page first without trying to consciously include your keywords. Then after your draft is complete, go back and review it to see how many times your keywords appear.
You may be surprised at how often you’ve used your keywords. Or if you need to add more in, look for places to insert them where they will appear natural, even if they weren’t. All in all, it’s another case of practice makes perfect – be creative and take your time with it and you’ll no doubt become an expert at keyword density.
Remember, balance is key so if in doubt, think of Goldilocks and getting it just right!!
Until next time…..
