There was a time when the usage of keywords in content designed for search engine optimization didn’t really matter. As long as you used the keyword as much as possible you were ok. Today, that is no longer the case, and the number of times the keyword is used in a page of content matters very much. With an understanding the keys to proper keyword density, the home based business owner can effectively create content that attracts visitors to his or her website like bees to honey.
You should use the keyword or keyword phrase 1 to 3 percent of the time on each page of content. For example, if there are 700 words in the content, the keyword should be used seven to twenty-one times, with the ideal number being 14, or 2%. You may hear that you should use the word 6% of the time, but this information is inaccurate, and that much usage of the keyword may be viewed as spam by the search engines.
Keywords should be scattered. It isn’t true that search engines only ‘read’ a certain portion of the page. They read the whole page. Your keyword should appear once in the title, once in the first paragraph, once in the second paragraph, and again in the last paragraph. If you can have more keywords to get to your 2%, make sure that you scatter them throughout the rest of the content.
You should bold some of the keywords, but not all of them. Ideally, the keyword in the title will use the H1 or H2 tag. The keyword in the first, second, and last paragraph should also be bold. Don’t worry about making the others bold. Just as you don’t want to overuse the keywords, you don’t want to overuse the bold tag either, since this is not viewed favorably by the search engines.
The number of times the keyword is used is not the only thing that matters. How the keywords and keyword phrases are used is also important. You must use proper grammar. The rule of thumb is to write for humans – not for search engines. Your sentences need to make perfect sense to anyone reading it – in the grammatical sense.
Finally, you can use more than one keyword or keyword phrase in the content, but it is not a good idea to overdo this either. Ideally, you will stick to one keyword or keyword phrase per page of content. The search engine spiders will find all of the keywords and keyword phrases, but it really needs to know which one to give weight to for that particular page.
Again, write for humans, and not search engine spiders. Once you’ve done this, you can go back and make sure that you used the keyword enough – but not too much.
