Don’t Overdo It

The only thing worse than having your keyword phrase not appear enough on your page is having it appear too many times. The search engines, especially Google, are wise to people writing pages for the search engines and not for people. If you stuff the page with keywords your rankings will be penalized. Google’s prominence in the search engine realm is due to providing a good user experience and they know how to weed out the junk.

Don’t Under do It

I have had clients ask me to look at  page and tell them why they were not ranking in the search engines for a particular search phrase only to find the phrase was not on the page at all. You cannot expect the search engines to read your mind. If you don’t include the search term a few times you can’t expect to rank for it. The clients often tell me they put the phrase in the META keywords tag and don’t understand why that is not enough. As you will see in another tip, for the most part, the search engines ignore the META keyword tag, especially if it doesn’t match the text on the page.

What is a Good Keyword Density?

There are no absolute number I can give you because there are many factors that go into how pages are ranked. However, for Google, a good range to shoot for is 3 to 5 percent. I’ve seen pages way outside this range rank well, but it depends on so many factors that there is no surprise in that. The 3 to 5 percent range is a safe bet, but don’t be concerned if some pages are lower or higher. Yahoo and MSN tend to do better with higher keyword density, so it is always good to mix it up to diversify your traffic sources.

I hope this tip has given you a guideline and a starting place. Be sure to read the rest of my search optimization tips to gain more knowledge of how the search engines work.