All About Adsense

Keyword Frequency is the measure of the number of times a keyword appears on a page, or in an area on a page. Search Engines place importance in the number of times a keyword is listed on your page. In general, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more relevant it will be to that search.

However, search engines will penalize you for keyword spamming if they feel you were excessive. A standard recommended repetition of each keyword is 3-10 times.

Why is the keyword frequency so important?
- Search engines like Google, Yahoo and AltaVista display results based on secret algorithms. No outsiders know the equations, but we all know that these are based mainly on keyword frequency and link popularity.

Why Keyword Frequency Matters

The first search engine optimisation topic most people come across is meta tag creation. Creating the right meta information is the be all and end all of traffic building as far as many webmasters are concerned. Although there are many other areas we consider to be equally imporant - link popularity, site navigation issues to name just two, successful meta tag creation is still fundamental to the search engine optimisation process.

We have already covered the meta information basics in another Bytestart article, but one area - Keyword Density (also known as Keyword Frequency), warrants an article of its own. Meta Information provides the “shop window” to a website - the Title, for example, is the first thing punters will see when they do a Google search, so it is important to make this tag readable and attractive, without trying to over-optimise it with your chosen keywords. Same goes with the Description tag.

Search engines will take your meta information as a guide to what your website is about. From these snippets of code, the crawlers will determine how relevant the content of a given page is to the meta information you have programmed in the header code. It is therefore important to ensure your keywords appear an optimum number of times within the page in question, without overdoing it.

To rank highly for a given keyword/keyword phrase, your keyword density (keyword frequency) should not be too high or too low. Too high and your page may be deemed as a spammers creation, and penalised. Too low, and the engines will think your content is unrelated to the keywords you have programmed, and rank lowly.

Gone are the “good old days” we remember fondly, when you could create a large number of keyword-rich pages and submit them to the likes of Altavista for a Top 10 ranking. Search engines are wise to this now - they are intolerant of such attempts to skew results. The only way to ensure a good ranking (in a meta sense) is to produce quality content-rich pages, which are genuinely related to the overall subject area you specialise in. In this content, ensure you repeat your prime keyword phrases, but at the same time ensure that the readability of any content isn’t compromised by your search engine optimisation effort!

Keyword Density algorithms will vary from engine to engine. What page text is indexed will also vary. But, fundamentally, if your keyword (or phrase) occurs 5 times in every 100 words viewed by an engine, your keyword density will be 5%. Read More>