All About Adsense

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keyword stuffing.

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Keyword Density: Frequently Asked Questions

How frequently should you use your keyword to rate highly for it in the search engines? How can you avoid penalties for keyword stuffing? Do the different search engines have different standards for the amount of times you can use your keyword on your site without invoking a penalty? Wayne Hurlbert tackles these and other questions in this article.

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is a combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a Web page. The more times the keyword appears in relation to the total number of on page words, the greater the overall keyword density. The more times that other words appear, the lower the proportion of keywords, resulting in a lighter keyword density.

Does keyword density make a difference?

The various search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search consider keyword density as part of their search algorithm. Each search engine has a different mathematical equation regarding the density of keywords that is rewarded with higher search ranking placement. There is also a different level of tolerance between the different search engines as to the degree of density permitted before a penalty is imposed.

Okay, so what are keywords anyway?

Keywords are the terms that searchers enter into the search engine’s search interface when seeking information, products, or services. The keyword is entered into the search engine algorithm as a mathematical calculation, to determine relevance of the many billions of Internet pages to that particular search. The pages the algorithm deems most relevant to the search for those keywords are ranked accordingly.

How are keywords different from keyword phrases?

A keyword can be one single word or a phrase including that word. Searchers use both types of entries when seeking information. As a general rule, the longer the phrase, the more specific the returned information will be from the search engine index.

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One of the simplest ways to improve your site’s placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page.

A keyword is a word that the user searches for when using a search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

Keyword density is normally calculated per tag, per section, and/or per web page. For search engine optimization,the tags such as the title tag and link anchor text, should have a greater keyword density and care must be taken that the keywords appear without repetition. More>

Here is a tool Keyword Density Analyzer,  to analyze keyword density of any web page.

Keyword proximity refers to the distance in space, as measured in within the keywords as well as the phrases including the keywords without repetition and with contextual relevance.

Keyword proximity measures the closeness between two keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For Search Engine Optimization, the proximity of the keywords or keywords included in a phrase in relation to each other and one another is of great importance and is the basis of using the appropriate combination of the words in the page titles,headers,paragraphs and page content.

Keyword proximity
by Mark Aaron Murnahan, CEO
YourNew.com / SnappyISP

Keyword proximity and the keyword density within your Website can make or break your search engine optimization efforts. In this edition of Mail @ YourNew.com, I will try to help you better analyze keyword usage and improve your search engine relevance.

The results of keyword proximity may be seen by taking a moment to perform a search in your favorite search engine. If you target a keyword phrase, you will often find that the difference between your keyword search and the same search using “stop words” (e.g. in, and, we, and of course, your company name or Website address) are vastly different. You should avoid “filler words” or “stop words” between important keywords. This is because if you can top the search engine results for non-broken phrases, you will be more likely to top a search engine for the broken search phrase as well. This is to say, far more likely than the reverse. Also, the logical search and the keyword phrase reversed (e.g. widgets Kansas vs. Kansas widgets) return much different results. Therefore, proximity should be used wisely.

Keyword proximity considerations should include the proximity of keyword or keyword phrases to other keyword occurrences within the page, as well as the top of the page. After all, the top of the page usually tells you what you are there to read about.

This obviously begins with the page title. Thereafter, you should consider the description tag, alternate text, heading tags, input tags, and the first sentence following the h1 tag. The order mentioned here is only because this is a common order seen in the HTML code, and not based on the level of importance.

Page Title: If you thought that a page title like “Web design and hosting” is a good page title, then you will obviously have a hard time competing against a Website titled “Web Design Web Hosting”. When you use “stop words” (words with no value and which search engines do not index), or your company name in your title, you throw your search engine traffic to the wind.

A properly formatted page will have the same keywords, in the same and varying keyword proximity, within the Web page title, description, first h1 tag, within the first sentence, and revisited within the overall page text. Additionally, a perfect page would have inbound, and outbound links with the keywords in the anchor text, and the anchor titles, and subsequent heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etcetera). Always be mindful that heading tags should reflect the overall page flow, and never be used improperly.

Some of the above deals with keyword usage, keyword density, and keyword placement, which I will address in future editions of Mail @ YourNew.com. For now, we are looking at the proximity of keywords.

Keyword Proximity Explained

An example of effective use of keyword proximity is to use your prominent keyword or keyword phrase in both forward and reverse proximity.

If I write about an Internet service provider specializing in accelerated dial-up Internet access, I will first consider the keywords I am targeting for the specific page. If I determined that the target keyword phrase is “accelerated dial-up“, I will want to use keyword proximity such as the following:

Page Title: Accelerated Dial-Up

Description: Accelerated dial-up: Surf faster with dial-up accelerated to 5x the speed.

Heading: Accelerated Dial-Up

Sample Sentence: SnappyISP Internet Service offers server-compressed accelerated dial-up service. Dial-up acceleration service provides up to five times the download speed of Web pages compared to standard dial-up Internet service.

In the instance above, I have used keyword proximity to display the keyword phrase as both “accelerated dial-up” and ” dial-up acceleration” and repeated it throughout prominent places within the page.

Please note that the keywords are used in both directions (e.g. accelerated dial-up and dial-up acceleration). It often takes a careful eye to detect proper keyword proximity usage, but search engines see everything.

As a side-note, some people think that they should hide keywords. I am not ashamed or afraid to tell you of hundreds of keywords I hold at the top of very competitive search engine results. The way I look at this is if you want to compete with me, I welcome your challenge. After all, I compete with millions of competitors on a daily basis. Hiding keywords is another upcoming article where I will dispel some myths, so keep reading!

As I have discussed in previous articles on keyword usage, and how to never cheat a search engine, you should not become overzealous with any tips that I offer. At the same time, if you have a page about a specific topic, you should make it clear why a reader is there, and why a search engine should index your page.

Keyword prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.

For example, an Infoseek search for keyword “Pre-Owned Electronics” returned the following match:

Pre-Owned Electronics, Inc - Refurbished and Used Apple Macintosh Systems, The independent source for new, remanufactured and used Apple Macintosh computer systems, parts, peripherals and accessories. We offer a full line of refurbished as well as used… 98% http://www.preowned.com/ (Size 3.1K)

Note that the queried keyword, “Pre-Owned Electronics,” is the first word of the site title and InfoSeek returned this site as the first match. Documents that are exactly the same, but with keywords as the second or third word in the Title will often score lower. Prominence also applies to the words within the body of the document, the headings, and other tags.

Prominence plays a critical role particularly in directory based engines such as Yahoo. Often having the keyword slightly more towards the beginning of the site description or site title will make a large difference in your ranking.

Examples of prominence:

If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.

If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be 50%.

If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.

If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.More>

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Keyword prominence
the location (i.e. placement) of a given keyword in the HTML source code of a web page. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and thus the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search engine user. Consequently, it’s best to have your first paragraph be chock full of important keywords rather than superfluous marketingspeak. This concept also applies to the location of important keywords within individual HTML tags, such as heading tags, title tags, or hyperlink text. So get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a good keyword rather than “Welcome to.” More>

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

The initialism “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

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You’ve probably heard of SEO, since it’s very hot right now.  It stands for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by designing the site content so that the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine.
The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that a user will visit that site.  Let’s face it, most people are lazy.  They’re not going to spend time clicking and scanning tons of pages of search results.  Therefore, where a site ranks in a web search is absolutely critical for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to make sure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how search engines work.  Typically, a search engine sends out a spider to fetch as many documents as it can. Then another program, called an indexer, reads these documents and makes an index based on the words each document contains. Each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm to create indexes so that hopefully only meaningful results are returned for each query.
These indexers compute the keyword density.
Keyword density refers to the how often a certain word appears in a given document.  It’s given as a percentage.  Let’s say you have a site about running shoes.  A keyword density of 7% on “running” on that web page means that out of 1000 words, 70 of them are “running.”
Unfortunately, the quick-buck con artists have figured this out, and they will put up a site that has a front page that is totally littered with keywords.  To give you an idea, a normal key word density for the main key words is about 3 to 7%.  What these people will do is have something insane like a 25% keyword density on their front page.  Then that page ranks #1 in search engine results when users search for that word.  Once the user is on the entry page, they’re likely to enter the site.
Pornographers do this by putting up sites that have content like:
Sex, sex, sex.  Sex is here.  You want sex.  We have sex.  Pix of sex, lots of sex.
See how annoying that gets?
Search engines used to use meta-tags to search for web sites.  This was nice, since the meta-tag was a hidden area of your page where you could put all the relevant keywords and not have to worry about making your content sound awkward by overusing certain words.

Any kind you want, of course, since we’re talking about the internet. But seriously, you’ll want to give this topic some consideration, since there’s more interest in some topics than others.
You know the people who are your audience, since ideally you’re talking about something you know about. For instance, if you’re talking about Ultimate Frisbee, it’s because you play it. So you know what other Ultimate people are like, and what they want to know and what they find entertaining.
Once you know that, you can decide about which types of content will best serve their needs and how to go about finding or creating it. Here are some general categories to get you started with your brainstorming:

Editorials
Feature articles
Political opinion
News stories
Art galleries
A conglomeration of the best content
Reviews of movies, books, music
Interviews
Interactive features - polls, feedback, discussion groups, forums, chat

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Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Google Scolar include materials across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

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What Kind of Blog Content is Google Looking For?

Since Google is the king of all search engines, they are dictating the exact keywords you need in your article or blog that will get you the thousands of hits per week required to really succeed in the world of the internet.

Google is constantly searching for blog content that contains not only the most popular keywords and keyword phrases that Google’s users are most interested in, but also the web pages that are linked to other content-heavy web sites.

A new SEO technique that you should start using today would be to start going to all of the various social bookmarking sites out there such as Digg, MySpace and Facebook and examine exactly what types of articles that the social bookmarking subscribers are linking to their own personal pages.

By analyzing the hottest articles and topics listed on the front pages of all of these popular websites, you are accomplishing ground breaking research into studying what kinds of subjects and topics that are compelling these millions of users to link certain kinds of articles to their friends. You can then write down the most popular article titles, study the fluid writing styles of the content writers who wrote them and examine the relevant subject matter. After compiling this information, you can then start writing down all of the most exiting subject topics that you would like to write about based on the most popular subject matter you have found on these bookmarking sites. Read More>

1. Offer to pay guest authors for their work.  A guest author could be someone you found on your bulletin board who happens to write well.
2. Exchange articles with the guest author’s site. Your site visitors benefit by providing them with another point of view. And you might just gain some new regular visitors from your guest author’s site!
3.  Make sure you get exclusivity. When someone writes for you, make sure they won’t submit that same article to dozens of other Websites and newsletters. When your site publishes exclusive content, you have opportunities for syndication in other publications, online and off, and you gain a lot of reader loyalty.  The key phrase in a contract with a writer is that you’re buying all rights, including electronic.

This is a category you might want to get a freelance writer for.  Go to elance.com and browse the profiles of Service Providers to see who does interviews, then talk to them.  Many freelancers specialize in celebrity interviews, and that’s what you want.

Interactive features - polls, feedback, discussion groups, forums, chat
This is one of the most popular types of sites for kids, teens, and young adults because they get to give their opinions (which many kids don’t get to do enough of at home, according to them) and they get to talk to others.
So, if you want to run this kind of site, bear your target market in mind.  It’s worth paying a few bucks to a freelance writer or graphic artist to come up with fun games that are constantly changing, or new polls, since people will come back time and again to give their opinions.  And don’t forget surveys people love to take surveys.

This is perhaps the easiest category to get content for.  If you have friends who are movie, book, or music fans, they’ll probably write reviews for free just for the thrill of seeing their stuff on a site.
Also, this is a never-ending source of content, since there are always new movies, books and music coming out.  Contrast that with dog breeds—once you’ve written everything there is to say about every known breed, you have to wait for them to come up with a new breed!
If you want to have some fun, you can review movies yourself.  And actually, if you’re running your Google adsense site as a business, you may even be able to deduct the cost of movie tickets from your taxes.   Check with a tax consultant to make sure, though.
Music is easy, too, especially if you live in a town that has lots of live music or festivals.  If not, you can buy used cd’s online, listen, and review.  In fact, you could even hire a high-school kid to do this, but check their writing skills first.
Books are a little harder, since they take more time to review and cost more than cd’s and movie tickets.  However, you can paraphrase what others have said if you’re clever and don’t violate copyright.

If you can make your site into the ultimate content resource on issues related to your topic, I guarantee you you’ll attract and retain a loyal audience. Your site will become known as a The Place for anyone who wants information on your subject.  For example, Harry Knowles has made aintitcoolnews.com into The Site for movie reviews and advance spoilers.
Since you’re the expert on your topic, you can evaluate sites and other resources (eZines, directories, books, offline publications) and sniff out the best ones to list along with your rating and opinions.
This sort of content is like the old book reports you used to have to write for school.  Read up thoroughly on your subjects, then hit the high points of a topic.  Or, consider writing a summary of three separate article that have the same theme.

News Stories
Your site can become a news source for the latest developments and happenings in certain niche area by providing timely news on topics of interest to your readers.  I’m not saying you can be the next CNN or MS-NBC, because that takes building a huge operation.  But what you can be is, for example, the CNN of the karate world, or the ABS-News of the bonsai tree hobbyists.
What you’ll want to do is create a separate section of your site to deal with industry news. Or, devote an entire site to news updates. There are many ways of presenting news:

As a feature article
As short news clips, with a link to the full story
As news stories, where each item is explained at length

However you decide present the news, make sure you give it your own personal style.  Check out salon.com.  Has its own style, doesn’t it?  Now look at drudgereport.com.  That’s another style. Make yours interesting, personal, chatty, fun, unique, or all of these  just make it yours.
Make sure your news is relevant, useful to your reader, and timely. Old news ain’t no news at all, it’s history!  So how do you get news?  By:
Subscribe to eZines on your subject or topic
Sign up for e-mail news delivery services
Register to get regular press releases on your topic
Surf the web for new news items
Get news from newspapers, magazines and books
Go to conferences, workshops or seminars and write about what you see and who you talk to.