Over Using Keywords?

barry100 · #11 06-02-2010, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnHutson

One of the many SEO "cant give you a straight answer" questions

To be honest, keyword density doesnt really exist nowadays

Do you really believe this?

What are you ranked for? I personaly am ranked 1st in my city for website designer and website designers and have been for more than 5 years plus I am ranked 11 (annoyingly as i was 5th for around a year) for the term website designer and this is on Google UK.

keyword density is a major part of SEO so it must be implemented correctly in the page. One thing you have correctly said is the 3% rule. I stick to this or rather 3 to 5% of the page.

Cathy · #12 06-02-2010, 12:14 PM

I read a recent Google webmaster post that was talking a lot about how they are working on synonyms etc. They suggested they were getting very much better at 'working out' synonyms and also when synonyms don't relate.

If that's the case then I would think that when you are looking at keyword density then it ought to be the density of the synonyms rather than each individual word. In other words:

'If you need widgets why not look at our blue widgets and you might want to consider our turquoise widets too'.

would have a much higher density than

'If you need widgets why not look at our blue widgets or why not consider our green widgets'.

That said, I think writing for the user with slightly less use of the pronouns (ie the 'it's 'they's etc) probably works best.

RandomTemplate · #13 06-02-2010, 12:23 PM

This drives me mad, i hate this topic but cant help but join in.

Sites content should be designed for people not search engines. You can modify the design & code to be good for search engines but don't start being prats with your content. Write the content properly, put keywords in bold etc but for the love of all thats holy do not tailor your content for search engines.

The more content the better, that is the only aspect of search engines optimization that should affect content, this density stuff is just crap, if your writing legit content on the sites topic you don't need to even think about density because common strings will appear on the topic without needing to focus on adding them, these are the types of terms people will search for.

Sorry to rant but in the industry this drives me mad, I hate with a passion any SEO company that starts interfering with the content of a site, mess with the code - fine, mess with the message - get the hell away from the site!

Cathy · #14 06-02-2010, 12:39 PM

Sorry to 'push your buttons' RT but I think natural language relies far more on the intelligence of humans, in a way that a computer is not (yet) intelligent enough to work out.. In purely natural writing repeating nouns reads very oddly but computers cannot work out the 'it's and 'they's.

Somewhere online there's a very interesting 'experiment' it's called something like 'Talk to God' and you can go and talk to this computer that tries to talk back to you. It can actually seems pretty 'real' but it really can't handle the 'it's' and 'theys' and you get some very odd conversations (actually if you've nothing better to do Google it cos it really can be quite funny, especially after a drink!)

Anyway, if you look at these 3 sentences:

We sell blue cups. They are fantastic. They will really make your day feel so much brighter when you wake up to your morning coffee'

To me that reads quite naturally but if I change it to:

'We sell blue cups. They are fantastic. Blue cups will really....'

This to me sounds odd (try reading it aloud!) but it's likely to be understood by a search engine rather better. So, if I was writing purely for the user I'd use the first example, whereas if I wanted to drop a few more hints to a search engine I'd use the second (and I don't think it sounds 'odd' enough to affect the user).

RandomTemplate · #15 06-02-2010, 12:54 PM

Cathy thats not in the slightest pushing my buttons.

I'm not disputing search engines view keyword density & hunt out the keywords etc, but if content is designed purely for them IE cram as much in as possible then it does become difficult to follow. For example.

RandomTemplate provide web development services based around User Experience, we tailor our services to meet your needs.

or

RandomTemplate provide User Experience and Web Development services based around improving the User Experience on your Web Site, we tailor our Web Development & User Experience based Services to your needs.

The Second is crammed and sounds way to stupid, the first is clear to the user. Alot of SEO companies (those which I would bomb given the ammunition) are destroying content on the Internet. You can write clear content, using your keywords (like you have above) but the moment that Keyword Density takes priority over the message of that content the web-server should be strapped with C4 and blown the hell out of existance.

barry100 · #16 06-02-2010, 02:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cathy

Sorry to 'push your buttons' RT but I think natural language relies far more on the intelligence of humans, in a way that a computer is not (yet) intelligent enough to work out.. In purely natural writing repeating nouns reads very oddly but computers cannot work out the 'it's and 'they's.

Somewhere online there's a very interesting 'experiment' it's called something like 'Talk to God' and you can go and talk to this computer that tries to talk back to you. It can actually seems pretty 'real' but it really can't handle the 'it's' and 'theys' and you get some very odd conversations (actually if you've nothing better to do Google it cos it really can be quite funny, especially after a drink!)

Anyway, if you look at these 3 sentences:

We sell blue cups. They are fantastic. They will really make your day feel so much brighter when you wake up to your morning coffee'

To me that reads quite naturally but if I change it to:

'We sell blue cups. They are fantastic. Blue cups will really....'

This to me sounds odd (try reading it aloud!) but it's likely to be understood by a search engine rather better. So, if I was writing purely for the user I'd use the first example, whereas if I wanted to drop a few more hints to a search engine I'd use the second (and I don't think it sounds 'odd' enough to affect the user).

lol kinda like CMDR DATA on startrek ?

JohnHutson · #17 08-02-2010, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by barry100

Do you really believe this?

What are you ranked for? I personaly am ranked 1st in my city for website designer and website designers and have been for more than 5 years plus I am ranked 11 (annoyingly as i was 5th for around a year) for the term website designer and this is on Google UK.

keyword density is a major part of SEO so it must be implemented correctly in the page. One thing you have correctly said is the 3% rule. I stick to this or rather 3 to 5% of the page.

I rank 1st on Google.co.uk for the term "roulette" (without quotes).

I personally think there are too many mentions of the word roulette on the entire page.

I have to agree with RandomTemplate - I would always suggest to clients to write naturally and then I would review it to see if anything needs tweaking and I mean tweaking.

I personally wouldn't ever think about density but thats just my preference. Plenty of people will be able to give me plenty of examples of heavy KW density working and plenty of people can give me examples of it not working.

The moment we can determine what 100% works all the time is the moment the search engines have failed in protecting a part of their algorithm.

Over Using Keywords?

Search Engine Optimisation