Don’t Talk To Me About Keyword Density

The semantics of understanding

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this post I want to clarify something. It saddens me to say the term ‘keyword density’ hasn’t yet been confined to the rubbish bin.

It is a term that’s still freely banded about by ‘SEO experts’ who claim to understand the inner workings of Google. Well if they did, they would know that ‘keyword density’ is nonsense.

Its origins come from this kind of mindset:

“The more I mention a phrase the higher the keyword density; the higher the keyword density the more relevant my page will be to Google. Therefore the more keywords I can cram into my copy the better.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

By thinking this way you completely disregard the competition from other pages – so what do you do? Take a look at them, work our their keyword density (total number of words divided by the number of times your phrase is repeated – expressed as a percentage) chuck in a few more instances of your keyword so your density is higher and, bingo! You’ve created the spammiest website known to man.

As a result all legibility, usability and clarity diminish.

If you are a die-hard KD fan and think I’m talking a load of c***p, let me ask you this – if KD was how the search engines calculate the relevancy of your web page, surely all you’d have to do is fill your page with your keywords. But if you did that, no one would use the internet because it would be full of gibberish. Hello? Are you getting it now?

The search engines aren’t stupid. Keyword density is useless – it totally ignores the contextual relevance of your page to your subject matter let alone internal links, back links, navigation, usability etc.

So how do you create SEO copywriting that the search engines love?

Its semantics Jim but not as we know it

Your keywords (and the quality of your keyword research) are important. But you don’t need to stuff your copy with them. When writing naturally you automatically build meaning by using keywords, synonyms, verbs and nouns.

Of course, placing your keywords in optimum places is very important – META tags, title tags, headings (H1 etc), navigation and links. But that alone won’t indicate to the search engines what your page is about.

For example, if you’re writing about ink, you have to give Google some help so it can determine how you are using that term.

The answer is semantics.

How to research related words

There are 2 ways you can go about researching related words. You can either guess, or you can use the Google Tilde Search.

I find the latter works best.

So how do you use it? Well simply type your keyword into Google immediately preceded by the tilde sign (~). You will then see several pages of results with the related terms in bold.

Going back to our word – when you search “~ink” Google shows us the following terms:

Inkjet
Cartridge
Inks
Toner
Paint
Pen

And that’s just from the first two pages of the search results.

Then all you have to do is drill down by picking the relevant terms and doing a Tilde Search on those too. Eventually you will have a list of related words that, when used within your text, will enhance the SEO on your website.

Why you need to know this

I should think that’s pretty obvious!

By using semantics within your website copywriting, you will be boosting the relevance of your pages in Google’s eyes. And the more relevancies you show, the higher your rankings.

But remember, this will only work in conjunction with a well planned SEO strategy.