You may have heard the adage floating around the SEO world that content is king. Well, the saying stands to reason. With all of the improvements that search engines are making to their crawlers, the more intelligently you can write, the better off you are. Picking appropriate keywords and then creating good content to go along with those keywords can aid you immensely when it comes time for search engines to crawl and assess the validity of your website.
There are several do’s and don’ts in the keyword picking process. The first DO is that you DO need to choose a keyword that fits your site. This might sound obvious, but there are sites out there that have done just the opposite. It will be much easier to write content for your site if the keyword is something that your site is actually focused on. Not only that, but if you are writing content for a keyword that doesn’t actually apply to your site, the bounce rate (people coming to your site, but then quickly leaving) is going to soar, which is not a good thing.
The second DO is that you DO need to research the number of searches that are made for your specific keyword, and you DO need to make sure that the amount of competition associated with that keyword is something you can handle. If you are only willing to spend a minimal amount of time on your SEO work, then picking a highly-competitive keyword probably isn’t the best choice. Instead, choose a keyword that has a decent number of searches per month with a low rate of competition.
After your keywords have been chosen, you can begin to focus your time on creating quality content. The content you put on your site should be well thought out and well written. While having good grammar and spelling are a must for any website, you must also make sure that your content is focused on your keyword. If you tend to stray on to tangents in your writing, you can lose your potential audience, who only came to your site because they thought you offered information or a product that
they want. Keep focused on the keyword and you will keep your audience on your site.
Keyword density is a term that floats around the SEO world to describe the amount of times your actual keyword appears in the whole of your text. While you can find varying opinions as to how much is too much and how much is too little, a good general rule of thumb is that your keyword should appear about 2-6% of the time in your content. This, however, is based on the number of words in your keyword and does not count the keyword as a whole as a single instance. For example, if your keyword is “scrapbooking kits” and your text has 400 words in it, your keyword phrase should appear at least 4 times, but no more than 12 times to achieve an overall keyword density of 2-6%. We get this number by taking the number of words in the content, then multiplying by our percentage and dividing that total by the total number of works in the keyword phrase. (400*.02)/2=4, or (400*.06)/2=12. This allows us to determine the number times we should use the keyword in our content.
Though 2-6% keyword density is recommended, there are still exceptions. If you have more than one keyword phrase that uses a particular keyword (such as “scrapbooking kits”, “scrapbooking themes”, “scrapbooking designs”, etc), it would be wise to use your best judgment. Adding similar keyword phrases too many times ends up making your writing look spammy and will turn away potential readers and customers. Read through your content yourself or have a well-educated friend read through it for you. If you don’t like what you see, change it. Trust yourself to be able to determine how much is too much.
In the end, well-written content with well-thought out keywords appearing several times in the text is going to help you more than anything else. Search engines will continue to get smarter about which sites are relevant and which aren’t, but if you have good content, your site will survive the test of time.
