If you’re concerned with ranking well in search engines (which you should be, appearing organically in search results is one of the best ways of increasing website traffic and subsequent sales), then there’s a good chance you’re looking at undertaking an seo campaign.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of optimising your website and building quality links to that website in order to rank higher in search engines for keyphrases related to your website subject matter. One of the most important parts of SEO is on-site optimisation; whilst this is a discipline in itself, this short article will focus on improving the keyword density element of your onsite SEO.
Keyword density refers to how often a word appears in a document, measured in terms of how many times the word appears against the overall length of the document. For example, a keyword which appears once in one hundred word document has a higher density than a keyword which appears twice in a three hundred word document.
Generally, it’s considered best practise to aim for a keyword density of between 5 and 10%; a keyword density higher than this can now cause you to be penalised by search engines, as this is indicitave of keyword stuffing, which is now considered spam.
It’s worth noting that Google is now sophisticated enough to recognise synonyms and other related words, so be sure to use them in your website copy.
You should also make sure that your keyword appears in the page title, as well as in the header of the page. For example, if you have a page about logo design, you should ensure that your title looks like this:
Logo Design from YOUR COMPANY
and that you have a H1 element at the start of the page, containing your keyword or phrase.
It’s also worth remembering that when you’re writing your copy, you should aim to have a slightly higher keyword density towards the start of the document, as this has been noted to help improve SEO.