List Your Keywords

You should carefully plan out what keywords to use in your content. There are tools online that could also help you choose keywords that are often used in search engines but most of the time, you have to pay to use these kinds of tools. List keywords you have thought of and if you can, consult with other SEO specialists to know which among your chosen words should be used.

Never Flood Your Article

Choose only one or two keywords to include in your article, maybe three the most. Putting so many key phrases on just one article does not give focus to any one of those keywords. Also make sure that the keywords come naturally in the content and are used in such a way that it makes sense. Flooding or putting too many of the keywords in the article also will not help.

Prioritize Your Market

Always keep in mind that your website is for people and not for search engines alone. Write contents that would cater to the needs of your market; something that is beneficial for them and one that they could share with others. This would also add traffic to your website.

Include Keywords In The Header Tag

The title of your article is as important as the body of the article. Search engines that are crawling your site look at the text in the header tag first. So the exact keywords you have in your content should also be in your header.

Utilize Exact Keyword Phrases

The phrases you choose for your site should be consistent throughout the content. Remember that search engines are machines so it wouldn’t be able to distinguish the difference in the meaning of the words being used. For example, the word wash in the phrase “white wash” or “wash basin” would be all the same for search engines. So exact phrasing of keywords being used should always be implemented in the content.

Using Photos

Images also help a lot in content marketing. Adding pictures that are related to your content especially to the keywords you are using would be useful on images searches. Ultimately, this would direct more traffic to your website because of the relevant images present.

All these tips can be used for a successful Search Engine Optimization. Although the contents in your site play an important role in the marketing of the site, there are other things to consider as well. So learn more about SEO marketing for a successful traffic generation to your website.

Getting Links Takes Time

First of all, securing inbound links takes time. A typical white hat SEO campaign will involve writing to other websites and web directories and inviting those other websites to link to our own. Without an SEO campaign, links from other websites take years to develop naturally. One way of looking at an SEO campaign is a process that accelarates what would occur naturally. And, as we all know, inbound links are counted by all great search engines as a “vote”–sites with inbound links are deemed stronger, and hence are ranked better.

This process of writing to other websites takes time. Even if you or your SEO consultant completed say, 100 requests in a day, the webmasters of those 100 other sites may not get around to answering immediately. I have received messages back from other websites over a year after I have made the link request. So, you’ll get some links quickly, and some links will take much longer. The good news is that when you do undertake link requests, you can reasonably expect that your requests will bear fruit down the road, and it’s good to know that you’ve got some links that will be coming in months down the road. It’s like saving for a rainy day.

Once You Get an Inbound Link, It Takes Time for That Link to Be Indexed

Now, let’s assume that a few weeks have passed, and you have secured 50 valuable inbound links from 50 great websites all pointing to yours; remember, you requested 100 and you will never get every link you ask for so this example might even be very rosy. Some webmasters will never answer your request, and some will not not link back for whatever reason.

But, so far so good, you have some links pointing in to your site.

But wait–Google and Yahoo may not get around to indexing those 50 pages for days or weeks. Google will generally index most sites in 3 to 4 weeks; Yahoo takes quite a bit longer, and MSN longer still (as these 2nd tier search engines improve their technology, look for their indexing speed to catch up; they are slow to index and they know it). And, until the search engines update their indexes of the pages that link to your site, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist.

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, search engines are not slaves to webmasters–search engines do not index every page they find. So, even if Google comes upon a web page with a link to your site, it may index that page immediately, it may return a few times before the page is indexed. In that case, some links may take months to be indexed.

Only after your link is indexed do you enjoy the inbound linking power that that site gives you.

The Sites that Link to You Have to Wait for Their Links Too

And, don’t forget that the sites that link to you are “living” websites too. The strength of their web presense is based upon the links that they receive–and that landscape is constantly changing. When your site is new, the sites willing to link to you are going to tend to be new as well. As such, the inbound linking power of the sites that link to you will tend to be on the lite side. However, those sites will grow into stronger sites as they age, and then the inbound links that you enjoy from other sites will rise with that tide.

The Sandbox Effect

And then of course there is the sandbox effect. The sandbox effect refers to the phenomenon of a temporary ranking penalty applied to newer websites that undergo rapid expansion in either size or inbound links. The effect is fiercely debated and never conclusively proven either for or against.

Google’s informal mouthpiece, Google employee Matt Cutts, has publicly stated “[t]here are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries.” Mr. Cutts’ statements are carefully crafted, frustratingly rare, and are widely regarded as extremely reliable.

And so, the sandbox effect may serve to temporarily dampen the effects of any promotional campaign that you undertake.

The lesson? Patience.

First, a quick definition. Keyword density is the frequency of a particular search phrase within a body of text or element within a web page. If a keyword phrase appears 100 times within the body of a web page with 1000 words, this frequency represents a keyword density of 10%.

I recently began thinking about keyword density after researching the question and learning that very few experts agree on the proper percentage of keyword density needed to achieve superior search engine results for a given keyphrase. So, we set out to run some analysis on a high-value, highly competitive search phrase to see what we could learn about keyword density. We selected the top search engine results pages and ran the results through a keyword density analyzer; we tabulated the results below.

How to Test Keyword Density: What Keyphrase to Test?

Our test had a few parameters:

1. First, the search phrase had to be something that was competitive. We wanted to test a search phrase that the SEO’ers had worked hard to optimize. A competitive phrase was more likely to have been tested and retested to obtain high rankings.
2. Second, we wanted a phrase from within the world of SEO–again, a phrase that was worked by its handlers, people that are versed in the idea of keyword density.
3. So, we settled on the phrase “SEO Expert”.

We Googled our sample test phrase and sure enough, the top results were from easily recognized names in the world of SEO. The number 1 result was Brad Fallon’s (of the StomperNet SEO education courses) page, BradFallon.com.

And here are the top 3 search results for the search phrase “SEO Expert” (using a Chrome browser):

1. www.bradfallon.com
2. www.top10seotips.com/seo_expert.htm
3. www.mrwebguru.com

Keyword Density – Running the Analysis

The table that follows shows the keyword density analysis for the top 3 performing pages for “SEO Expert” for a variety of HTML elements. We have also included the total number of on-page words.

What It Means, and Solving the Riddle

These results intrigued me–at first. Top10SEOTips and Mr.WebGuru’s keyword densities, while for the most part relatively equal, bear almost no relation to the number 1 result, BradFallon.com.

First, with respect to Top10SEOTips and Mr.WebGuru, the results make sense. Sure, there are some differences: Mr.WebGuru has no Meta Keyword for “SEO Expert” and has no bolded body text. Nevertheless, the similarities between these two pages are striking: the keyword densities for Title Tags (22 vs. 28%) Total Word Count (1228 vs. 1366), and H1/H2/H3 Tags (23.5% vs. 25%) are nearly equal.

Meanwhile, Brad Fallon hardly seems to be trying–hence the riddle. Except for a very high keyword density in BradFallon.com’s Title Tag, the search phrase hardly appears at all. And, a reading and review of the pages themselves makes quite clear that Top10SEOTips and Mr.WebGuru are highly focused and hyper-optimized pages, while BradFallon.com is simply a blog front page which displays his 10 most recent posts.
So why does BradFallon.com rank so well for “SEO Expert” when his on-page keyword density is near zero? The answer lies in the number of backlinks that each page enjoys.

As this table shows, BradFallon.com enjoys a tremendous number of backlinks, more than 10 times the 2nd and 3rd results combined. BradFallon.com’s backlinks obviously “brute forced” the search rankings and pushed it to the top of the results–despite BradFallon.com’s lack of specific optimization for the phrase “SEO Expert”.

Keyword Density: The Lesson

But we set out to learn about keyword density–we already know backlinks are important. Setting aside BradFallon.com, the 2nd and 3rd ranked sites offer a valuable lesson. These highly tested pages are obviously finely honed–and thus the keyword density percentages that appear on these pages are a valuable and reliable benchmark that I’ll use going forward–at least until I can get 16,000 backlinks.

-Michael