Road to Website SEO Bliss Part 2- Keyword Density

This is part two of my series on SEO bliss.  Part one can be found here, and talks about using eBay pulse as a keyword generator.

Continuing on from that post…..

Following my few weeks of trying out different keywords on my website from eBay pulse, I ventured over to Google Trends and went through the same sort of process.  As I have said previously, Google Trends is a bloogers ultimate tool because it tells you what is current and what people want to know about, right now!! So if you want traffic and want to make an impact, whether you use your own blog, digg, facebook, Yahoo 360, Blogger.com or whatever, Google Trends can help you get your two cents out there.

There isn’t really one thing that you can do to improve your traffic. The search engine algorithms are far to complex for that;  its not about just doing as much optimizing as you can and hope you get noticed.  The scatter gun approach wont yield you enough results for the effort you will have to put in.  What is important is doing a few things well !!!

We all know about keywords, and as a novice website owner I thought that if I just used the hottest keywords, as lots and lots of then I would get more traffic.  Well is just doesn’t work like that – not anymore (if it ever did).  You cant simply go to Google Trends, see what the world is buzzing about, enter the top 10 or 20 keyword searches from Google Trends into your site and wait for your traffic to spike.

If your going to use keywords, just use a few, and use keyword phrases……like “Internet Marketing” or “Website Optimization” or “eBay Powerseller” (if that’s your area), what I mean is use keyword phrases 2 or 3 words.

Once you have picked your keywords use them throughout your website.  I can’t stress enough how absolutely important this is.  If you run a website on selling pet food, and think if you enter some of the top searched keywords like  “Paris Hilton”, “Kylie”, “Google”, (as these are usually pretty popular keywords) your will get better search results, well I’m sorry to say you are wrong and your certainly not tricking the search engines.

It’s all about the density, page relevance and inward and outward links.  Google Trends is great for telling you what the world is searching for, its also great for telling you what the world is searching for in your particular niche.

For example if we stick to the “Pet Food” example, the main worldwide searches as specified by Google Trends for the last 90 days (these were my search parameters) were as follows: -

As you can see from the above results, people are searching for the keyword phrase “dog food” and “cat food“, pretty much as one would expect as they are the most popular domestic animals worldwide.  You can also see that in these phrases the word “food” is more prominent in the search than the word “pet“.

This search details those keyword phrases over the past 90 days (again part of my search parameters) that have showed significant prominence.  This does not necessarily mean they are the top keywords, more that there has been a spike in there use.  This may be from a recent advertising campaign, news event (which is really just advertising at a set time) or discovery.

Google defines a “Rising Search” as: -

Rising searches highlight searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. So if you’re comparing data for a search term during 2006, the time period serving as the basis of comparison is 2005. Similarly, if you’re comparing searches for that term during May of 2006, the basis of comparison is April of 2006. (Click here for the full definition by Google)

Last of all is the geographical regions;  as we can see most searches for “pet food” important and products are coming from the United States.  I can further tell you from going further into the search results that the bulk of searches for the keyword phrase “Pet Food” in the US and UK are coming from:

1. Poplar, England in he UK; and
2. Madison, Wisconsin in the United States

There must be a lot of pets in these areas, or someone is really interested in Pet Food.  You can have an field day with Google Trends data!!! The amount of information available to the general public is just amazing.  Imagine what information isn’t available to the public.  Ahh the conspiracy theorist in me…that’s another series of posts (perhaps)!

Ok, so I’ll get back on topic.  The above Google Trend search has told us that people in the US are searching for Pet Food more than anyone else in the world and the most popular keyword phrase used is “dog food“, followed by “cat food” and “natural pet supplies“.

If you were to use these keyword phrases as you keywords, and did nothing else with them, your chances of increasing traffic to your site would be next to zero (this is assuming you didn’t have these words throughout your page content – see below on this point).

Search engines like keyword density, they calculate the density of the keywords you have used in your site/ page and this translates to the page relevance.  Search engines don’t want there customer finding websites that have no relevance to the search that was performed.

So to give you ever chance of getting your site up the ranks, you would want to get the word “Pet Food“, “dog food“, and “cat food” in your title, as your keywords, as well as mentioning them as many times as you can throughout your site/ content.  I say site or page as Word Press for example lets you set keywords for each blog post, and so do many other web programs.

Search engines want accurate page relevance, and sparing use of keywords (that is the old habit of keyword stuffing is dead).  Pre 1998 you would usually enter a keyword meta tag on every web page, and webmaster got in the habit of entering the same keyword over and over again – hence the phrase “keyword stuffing”.  Back then this seemed to work, however now all search engines have dropped support for the meta keyword tag, so using this technique will do nothing for you.  If you have a keyword meta tag, this part of your page will still be indexed by the search engines, yet they don’t do anything with it.

Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page by storing all the HTML content it finds.

I would recommend you try not to use more than 8 keywords or keyword phrases per page, I know its hard but your page relevance will be all the better for it.  Also, try and mention you keyword phrases at least 5 times minimum on the page, and use at least one of your keyword phrases in your title.  This promotes your page relevance with the search engines and will get you moving up the ranks to SEO bliss.  Also underline words and bold them, this shows the search engine spiders that, that particular word has emphasis, further “quotation marks” also promote keyword relavance.  Hence bolding a few of your keywords is a very handly little tip.  This again doesnt mean that you get your keyword such as “dog food and bold, underline and put it in quotations: “dog food“  Again it needs to be relevant, even gramatically relevant to assist your rankings.

The next part of this series on SEO I will be taking about some excellent FREE SEO tools on the net to seek out top keywords, submit your site to Search Engines and optimize each page of your site.  But for now remember:

1. Use your keywords as many times as you can within your page content
2. Try and get your keyword phrases into your titles
3. Use bold, underline, and quotation marks to promote keywords, but do it relevantly
4. Keep your pages on topic and or cover only a few topics per page, this helps you stay focused on your keywords.

That’s it for now thanks for reading……I know it was long.  If you liked this post, why not subscribe and get loads of free advice and ebooks or follow me on Twitter.