One of the first things I did when I first started to work on my own sites was to look at the sites that ranked at the top of the search engines for terms that I thought made the most sense. By using the Google Toolbar I was able to do a search for a term. Look at the result and click on the highlighter button on the toolbar and I would see how many times the search term showed up on the site that I was looking at. What I found is that the typical real estate site would have the city name and the term real estate strewn throughout the index page. In fact though keyword density is not an exact science I came to the conclusion that a term needed to show up at least 30 different times on a page in some combination of terms relating to the keywords that you were optimizing around.

Obviously Keyword Density is just one component in SEO, however its important to make sure that your content which should flow well for the reader should also have enough references to the keywords you want to show up for so that Google or any other search engine can be sure that they are sending readers to a site that is relevant to the search that they made. If you aren't sure about what keywords you should be optimizing around try using SEO Digger on your competitors websites and seeing what keywords they are optimized for as well as the projected traffic and ranking for those keywords. This will at least give you an idea of what keywords your competitors deem important and you might find some hidden gems in their keywords that you can use on your site as well.

So class, remember there will be a test on Keyword Density... It's a test that the search engines will do on your website to make sure they are sending their constituents to the right site. :D

Labels: SEO Strategies, Website Design