Let's do a quick re-cap. By now you should have:
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Selected your vertical market category
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Established a main keyword phrase
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Discovered a list of variations on your keyword phrase (from WordTracker)
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Wrote content for the keyword phrase with the highest traffic potential
Our next step will be to
increase the density of your keywords within your content.
When you wrote your content you most likely made
reference to your keyword phrase one or more times. Whether you're aware of it or not, by doing so you have employed one of the most
basic of SEO practices!
Keyword density refers to the percentage of words on a webpage that contains your specific keywords. Keyword
density is one of several criteria that is used by search engines to determine whether your webpage is relevant to specified keywords
or a keyword phrase. As such, you want your keyword phrase to appear several times within the body of your content. Be careful though...
if you drop your keyword phrase into every sentence of your content you could get penalized for Google for spamming the search engines,
a
black hat SEO practice commonly known as
Keyword Stuffing.
At the same time you'll make your content unreadable to users, which
essentially will render it worthless. Content should be written with the user in mind FIRST and the search engines later, thus why we
had you write your content before introducing you to the concept of Keyword Density.
Now that you understand the concept of keyword
density, it's time to apply it. Although there is no formula for determining keyword density, it's recommended that your keywords appear
as many times as possible within the body of your content
AS LONG AS IT REMAINS READABLE!
We cannot stress enough how important it is to
maintain readability and the quality of your content. As tempting as it may be, never write your content for search engines as your primary
focus. Doing so will only hinder rather than help your rankings.
