The term ‘keyword density’ shouldn’t even be part of your vocabulary.
Harking back to the bad old days of search engine optimisation, it was believe that to rank highly for your chosen terms you had to repeat them as many times as possible. Surprise, surprise that just let to website upon website of incoherent ramblings that offered no value whatsoever to the user.
Hence the constantly changing Google algorithms that are designed to wheedle out those who try to beat the system (you can’t, so don’t even try) rather than going to the trouble of creating content that is meaningful, relevant and useful.
Getting your SEO right
I’m pleased to say that most of today’s SEO copywriters understand the value of natural content that’s written primarily for the reader.
And before you ask, yes it is still effective from an SEO perspective. The keywords you’ll be targeting are going to be related to the subject you’re writing about, therefore they will crop up automatically as you write without the need of ‘stuffing’. And, rather than the end result being a meaningless humble of words, your reader will receive well written content that’s relevant to them.
If you’re still not convinced and firmly believe that your writing should contain a certain percentage of keywords, here are some words of wisdom from Google’s very own Matt Cutts speaking at this year’s SXSW:
“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
Going natural
Basically, if you continue to over stuff your content with keywords you will damage your website, your conversion rate and your rankings.
The characteristics of good SEO copy are:
- Writing that’s natural
- Content that’s written for the reader
- Copy that’s simple to understand
- Being well laid out
It’s as simple as that.