by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: July 28, 2010

Keywords and key phrases are the cornerstone of successful SEO practices. A good keyword can mean the difference between a cash cow and a site that sinks into obscurity and does nothing but drain the site owner’s budget without returning anything. However, simply choosing a good keyword and throwing it into your content will not ensure good ranking in the search engines; you also need to know how to handle it properly so that those engines will recognize that your site is full of good, relevant content for that keyword. For this reason, an understanding of keyword density, prominence, and frequency are an essential part of achieving that all-important search ranking.

Density

This is possibly the most well-known and arguably one of the most important parts of content optimization. Once upon a time, search engines ranked sites based on how many times the search term occurred within the site. This led to black hat marketing techniques such as keyword stuffing, meaning that the keyword was simply placed on the site as often as possible. Sometimes this even meant placing the keyword over and over in the margins in a color that matched the page’s background, along with mentioning the keyword in every single sentence of the content. The result: lots of useless garbage floated to the top of the search engines. Today, search engines generally want to see a keyword density between 2% and 5%, or roughly 3-7 times per average paragraph. Any site that goes significantly over the desired density may take a hit in PageRank due to the possibility of substandard content.

Prominence

Keyword prominence factors into how the search engines rank because, quite plainly, what’s at the beginning is most likely to be the important part of your site. Most internet surfers will only stop on a site for a matter of seconds trying to find the information they want, and will move on if they don’t find it. Search engine algorithms attempt to factor in this behavior and give greater weight to keywords that occur near the beginning of paragraphs in your content. In general, you’ll want your primary keyword to appear in the first sentence of your content, and then again in the first half of each paragraph. The second half of paragraphs is often reserved for long-tail keywords that already have low competition, and so are more likely to rank high regardless of where the keywords appear.

Frequency

As has already been hinted at, keywords should appear at least in every paragraph throughout your content. In addition, it is very important that those keywords be spread throughout the content. If all of your keywords are bunched in a single part of your content, that chunk of content may be recognized as substandard due to an overly high density, while the parts of your content with very low frequency may not even be identified as related to the search topic. A good balance is essential for optimal recognition and ranking.

Every search engine determines the quality of sites in a slightly different way, so the keyword placement that works well for one may not be the best for another. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different keyword placement on different sites to see which ones work well in which search engines, allowing you to tailor your optimization efforts accordingly.

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