All Entries Tagged With: "chris Knight"

Are You A Keyword Abuser?

Christopher Knight at EzineArticles wrote a blog post recently that discusses why his article directory rejected a large number of articles due to “keyword and keyphrase abuse.” This is becoming a huge issue across the web in general and at article directories in particular because all of the article directories have a problem with spam. A lot of the spam is from people who are not trying to abuse the system. They just don’t understand how to write articles properly.

Knight’s blog post was written to explain to article marketers why their articles were rejected and to apologize to some writers of legitimate articles for false positives that led to their good articles being rejected. He also offers suggestions for improving article content to prevent keyword and keyphrase abuse. Among them are:

• Don’t make repetitive key phrases and keywords bold or italics.
• Don’t use software to assist yourself to meet keyword and key phrase density metrics.
• Don’t repeat key phrases more than once per sentence.

Which Of These Keyword Points Is Not Like The Others?
I’ve never been a big fan of software assistance in writing articles. Software cannot think intelligibly, which is a necessary skill for article writing. Someone, a real live person, needs to read every article to critically analyze information, word order, grammar and syntax, and intent of message. Computers are not adept enough yet at that task to make using them effective.

That last point is one that I find surprising to find necessary in saying. Though I do believe it is necessary because many new writers do not understand what is meant by “keyword density” nor do they understand that there is no optimal keyword density. Even worse, they do not understand that too much density is worse than no density at all. You cannot optimize an article with excessive keywords. If you don’t talk that way naturally, don’t write that way.

Knight’s first point is problematic for me for one reason: He has taken the extreme approach of rejecting all articles with any bold text in them.

Making your target keywords or key phrases in BOLD or ITALICS makes your article look like keyword spamming.

Even if what you read is true (I really don’t know if it is true), we’re not going to allow that on articles that we accept.

Bolding keywords and keyphrases for SEO only reasons is a huge mistake and destroys your credibility.

It adds no value to the user and it’s deceptive because the reader thinks you’re trying to call their attention to something important and when they find out you’re just trying to get some SEO love, they know you never cared about them in the first place.

The above comment is taken from a response to a comment by a reader of Knight’s blog, who pointed out, correctly, that search engines seize upon bold words as more important than non-bold words and ranks them higher. In my experience, this is true. But I do agree with Knight that bolding words and phrases only for SEO reasons is a bad practice. It is somewhat deceptive, but worse, it looks spammy. Why someone would engage in a practice that makes them look like a spammer even if they are not trying to spam is beyond me. But people do it. Which is why EzineArticles is changing its policy – I just think they are going too far.

Why Bold Text Is Good
There are legitimate reasons for bolding text in an article and it all doesn’t boil down to SEO. But, if I were to bold any text for those legitimate reasons then I’d want it to be text that includes my keyword or keyword phrase because the search engines will ascribe additional SEO points to those. That’s not why I do it, however. The best reason, and in my mind the only real legitimate reason, to bold text in an article is to draw human attention to that text for the purpose of making a point that you want your reader to walk away from without missing. The same is true of italics – do it when it makes sense to draw your human reader’s attention to specific text for the purpose of pointing out something you don’t want them to miss. I use this tactic most often in lists. For instance:

• When I have a list of items followed by commentary – I want my reader to see the larger point and I want to distinguish the bullet point from the explanation of it because it makes the text more readable.
• This is doubly true for long lists – If you have long lists, or lists that include a lot of commentary then this is even more true because a long list or explanation could blend in with the rest of the article and you don’t want that to happen.
• Even on short lists, the bullet points are easier to see - If the initial clauses of these bullet points were not bolded then they would not attract your eye as well as they do now. That’s all I really need to say.
• Not every bullet point in your articles need to have your keyword in them - When you write your bullet points, think of your reader. What do they want to know. People scan first then read what they find interesting. Bolding your bullet points makes it easier for them to scan. When they see something they want more information on, they will stop and read that part. This makes bold text all the more valuable to your reader.

I hope that little exercise illustrates how bold text can be used legitimately in articles as well as blog posts to keep your reader interested. If I write articles that I know will appear in an e-zine and link back to my website then I want those articles to appear in the e-zine exactly as I’d want them to appear in my own. Therefore, bold text is sometimes legitimate even if it does include some SEO benefit that I wouldn’t get without bolding the text.

Hat’s Off To Chris Knight
Chris Knight does include some great information in his blog. Most of it, in fact, I would agree with. I really like that he pointed out that article titles should have one instance of the keyword in them and no more. I also like that he pointed out that good article titles include 40% keyword text and 60% natural language. The same could be said of article subheads. To me, every article should be strong on natural language and lightly peppered with keyword phrases for the best results.

One other thing I like about Knight’s blog post is that he mentions that keywords should not appear but once every 100 words. That’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s simply a good rule of thumb. I like to tell people once per paragraph on average. That’s based on the idea that good article writing relies on variation of paragraph length – some are short and some are long. If I have a 750 word article with 3 50 word paragraphs, 4 100 word paragraphs, and 1 200 word paragraph then that article will have 8 keywords in it, about the same number of keywords that Chris Knight suggests.

Bottom line: When you write articles, they should not be focused on keywords. Your articles should be mindful of keywords, but focused on providing useful information to your human readers. If you do that then you should be able to get your articles approved at any article directory.