Jul
23
Should KEYWORD Density Still Matter In Your Business’s Optimisation Method
The selection and use of keywords for search engine optimisation is still an area open to many different practices of varying quality. Some methods in use have been effective in the past but have never really been welcomed, and search engine changes have made these less relevant. Some specialist search engine optimisation consultants have thought in terms of a keyword density ratio, trying to arrive at an equation for the number of times a keyword should appear in the content of a page. However, there is no mythical formula. Keyword density as a concept has been discounted frequently over the years by numerous search optimization consultants but some optimisation consultants still cling to the idea.
Keywords need to be visible in page text to make it easier for a new client to appreciate the significance of the page he has landed on in relation to his search. It does no harm to assist the search platforms either, so a few repetitions of the keywords chosen for emphasis is fair. Some attempts to be helpful could lead to the use of keyword stuffing, even to the point of hiding keywords by making text and background the same colour. Keyword stuffing to inflate the density ratio may have worked in the infancy of search platforms but it is not effective now.
Well written content on your company’s domain will attract new clients and encourage the search platforms to extract the keywords they consider will influence your organic search engine positioning. Well written copy that does not to change too frequently is worthwhile as the search engine index references stay relevant for longer without having to worry about when your company’s domain next needs to be crawled by the search engine.
Including selected keywords in the page titles and names of your company’s domain help to improve its visibility on the search engine results page for new clients.
This association of keyword to page is used in the documents produced to help to promote your company’s domain. This can be a long-term process, something not always appreciated by search optimization consultants who still think that a high keyword density is still a major factor in increasing the search engine positioning more quickly. By being a less visible process, the success of this written promotion is a harder idea to explain for an optimisation professional than a simple density ratio that has no real meaning.
There are many elements in the search engine optimisation process that can be applied to a company’s domain to improve its organic search engine positioning. Some elements have become less important as the search engine algorithms have developed over the years of their existence. It can be argued that including keyword metatags to the underlying code of a web page no longer serves a purpose, because of the search engines’ reliance on page content. Keyword metatags are still a useful way of keeping a reference of the keywords that we want to associate with a given page in the search optimization process. Choosing the right keywords to promote as part of your optimisation method is still important, and how those keywords are handled is equally important. Thinking in strictly mathematical terms of a keyword density has never been useful.