Focusing On Keyword Density Won’t Produce
Good Articles

By allen on September 10th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article SEO, Article Writing, Author Resource Box |

Some folks are still under the false impression that keyword density is important. It’s not and it never has been.

The Definition Of Keyword Density
Keyword density is defined as the percentage of targeted keywords to your total number of words in content. So if your targeted keyword is “bacon bits” and you write a 1,000-word article using the targeted keyword 20 times, your keyword density will be 2%. Many gurus say the optimal keyword density is somewhere between 1% and 7%, the optimal varying depending on which guru you speak to, but 1% is the low and 7% is the high end of the advice given.

There are several problems with this approach to article writing:

• No. 1, if you write naturally then any well-written article will fall within that range of keyword use
• The focus on keywords seems wise because search engines rank pages for keywords
• Note that search engines rank pages for keywords, not according to keywords - not a semantic delineation
• Search engines give weight to a number of factors on a page and off-page and the weight given to each of the factors is different and could fluctuate from one day, week, or month to the next
• No one knows the weight given to all the factors on any given day

In short, search engine ranking factors are a mystery. No one knows what they are completely. We can guess what they are based on past experience, but since the search engines are always changing their ranking algorithms we can never fully know the complete picture.

On ranking pages for keywords vs. according to them, when you type “bacon bits” into the search field at your favorite search engine and get a list of web pages for that keyword, you will likely get results that are close, somewhat close, and not even close to what you are looking for. Even a web page about interstellar space travel could show up on the results page if the keyword is used on the page. Inbound link anchor text is as important a ranking factor as actual keyword usage and all you have to do is Google “About Us” to see this in action.

Click on the search results for PCWorld’s About Us page. There are 279 words in the body content of that page. Exactly 0 of those words are the phrase “about us”, yet the result is the fourth from the top on the Google search results page. If I use the browser find function for the phrase then I’ll find only one usage of that phrase on the page and it’s on the bottom menu bar, which means it will appear on every page of the PCWorld website. This page’s keyword density is - drumroll - 0. Pretty important, huh?

So How Does Keyword Density Apply To Article Marketing?
So how does this relate to articles that likely won’t appear on your own website. First, you have to understand the goal and importance of article marketing. The goal is to promote your website, building inbound links, and drive traffic to your site. You are not building on-page SEO benefits. Furthermore, your link building benefits do not exist within the article itself, but in the author resource box at the end of the article. This is where you’ll put your inbound links.

Let’s assume you write a bang-up author resource box with one good anchor text link to the page that you want to benefit. Does that mean the rest of your article is not important? No, not all.

You want your article to be well-written and reader-friendly. That is, you want readers to be able to get some benefit out of it. Otherwise, it’s a pretty useless article. It can be SEOd to the hilt and have perfect keyword density, but if readers within your niche don’t find the article of any value then it’s a perfectly useless article. The article, above all, must have value. Even an article with sub-optimal keyword density can drive traffic to your website and build you solid inbound links if it provides real value to readers within your niche.

Any article that is deemed a quality article by e-zine publishers, bloggers, and webmasters within your niche may be used by them. Every time a publisher uses your article you’ll get a new inbound link. If your article is SEOd well then the publisher will get the benefits of on-page SEO. You, however, as the writer, will get the benefit of off-page SEO. Neither on-page nor off-page SEO is more important; they must work together to achieve the same benefit for your website. Obviously, on-page SEO must come first or any off-page SEO you strive for will be in vain. Article marketing uses the age-old principle: Help yourself by helping others first.

That said, you should write articles that provide publishers with the best on-page SEO benefits as possible. If you do that then they’ll use more of your articles. You’ll get more links to your website, their readers will get the benefit of your knowledge, and the publishers will get the benefit of highly optimized web content. But what does that mean?

What Highly Optimized Article Content Means
Remember those ranking factors? You aren’t trying to build inbound links to your articles so forget about link building for a moment. A highly optimized article is good “on-page” SEO. That means keywords are important - very important - but not the most important thing. You also need to think about your article title - which is critically more important than keyword density - as well as subheadings within the article, ordered and unordered lists, and font characteristics (bold, italics, etc.).

You don’t want to bold or italicize your keywords just for the sake of adding characteristics that you think the search engines will love. You want to do so when it’s important to the reader. For instance, I like to bold the first sentence of long bullet points in my lists. Or, if I list bullet points followed by an explanation of each point, I like to bold the list item before the explanation to make it stand out to the reader more. While doing that I like to see if I can squeeze a keyword into a couple of those bullet points. Just a strategy that I’ve found that works.

Bottom line: Keyword density is a fake panacea for article optimization illnesses. It is infinitely more important to write an article that is beneficial to the reader, but while doing that it is important to look for ways that you can increase your on-page (ie. internal article) SEO. Density is a small measure for that goal and one that won’t give an accurate telling.