What are keywords and what is keyword density? When it comes to making your blog posts SEO compliant, keywords are a very important piece of the puzzle. But why is it? In this post I will talk about Keywords and how important Keyword Density is when it comes to generating traffic from Search Engines.
Have you heard this talk about keywords and keyword density to help optimize your blog posts to it’s best potential?
When I started blogging in 2010 this is all I heard: You must have keywords in your blog. It was recommended that you should have it in your Title, Subtitles, the first sentence of your blog post and in the last sentence of your blog post in order to generate a lot of traffic.
So I thought wow, I need to put as many keywords in my blog post as much as possible. But then again, I really didn’t know what a keyword was!
Was it some type of secretive, esoteric word that only social engine elitist knew the essence of it? Would I be qualified to the be in a blogging special force that will reveal all the secrets of generating all the traffic I want? Well maybe I went a little too far with this, but you get the picture.
But before I go any further, lets define what a keyword is for those of you that don’t have a clue of what I’m talking about.
“Keywords are words or phrases that people type into a search box of a search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..) in order to search for a subject of interest or words.”
So If you want to do a search on the American Civil War in Google, then the words American Civil War is what you would type into Google’s search box. These would be the keywords.
With that being said, back in 2010 when I first started, there was this thing called Keyword Density as well. This is how many times your keywords appear in each of your blog posts.
You wanted to have just enough keywords within your blog to Rank well with search engines. Back then it was more about have SEO compliant blog posts more so than having valuable content in order to generate a lot of traffic.
Keyword Density From 2011 and beyond
Although I entered the Blogging scene in 2010, it appeared that it was at an end of an old era of SEO filled blog posts of generating massive traffic using black hat seo tactics.
With Keyword Density, it was the end of the time where you can do “keyword stuffing” which is where you packed your blog posts with keywords, even though it may sound like you’re creating “run-on sentences” and your blog content didn’t flow naturally.
Now believe me, I’m not the greatest writer in the world, but I have came across some blog posts that were SEO rich with keywords, but yet the content wasn’t valuable and a lot of them didn’t make sense at all.
I felt great about my writing after reading some of these blog posts!
But as 2011 came around, I start reading about Google Algorithms and how they were changing them to benefit the blogging community as a whole. Many of bloggers around that time started losing a lot of traffic, especially those that were using black hat seo tactics.
Google has been changing their Algorithms since 2000, usually doing around 500 – 600 minor updates a year . The major Google updates started around 2011 and I can remember a lot of people got the notorious “Google Slap”.
As far as keyword density is concerned, Google became a bit more indifferent towards it, and focused more on content and social proof.
I talk about what Google looks for to send traffic using it’s Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph uses an algorithm that relies on how well you brand yourself. With a great personal brand it will positively affect your authority, reputation and trust rank. The Keywords that your target market types into search engines ties into Googles Knowledge Graph.
With that said, let’s see what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about Keyword Density.
My 4 Tips For Whenever You Consider Keyword Density
1. Keep Your Keywords At A Minimum
When writing your content, It’s still safe to add keywords. In fact I recommend it since it ties into the Google’s Knowledge Graph. Just don’t overdue it because as much that it can help you, keyword density can also hurt you.
2. Put Your Keywords in the Title and Description
These are Two things I highly suggest! Putting your keywords in your title and in the description of your content will help with traffic. You want to keep in mind that Google focuses more on how well you engage your target market for it to build it’s Knowledge Graph.
Putting the keyword in the title will reflect what’s in your target audience’s mind which in turns shows how well you know them. Also adding the keywords to the description of your content is the extension of the Title, giving a summary of what the rest of the content is about.
3. Keep Your Content Natural and Let It Flow
You definitely don’t want to your content to look choppy and out of sync with your readers. This will definitely not look good to Search Engines and especially to your readers.
Whenever you use keywords, you want to place them in your content well enough for it to like as though you’re not using SEO. It also helps to put your keywords in your H1, H2, and H3 tags as well as the first and last sentence of your content.
4. Using Also Plugins Helps With Keywords.
One thing I mentioned is that Plugins helped me with making my blog post SEO compliant. The one plugin that provides a checklist that I used is SEOpressor which isn’t free but is very detailed about helping you make your blog SEO Compliant. With this plugins it helps you to make sure you have your keywords in the right places.
There are two free SEO plugins that you may consider that will help as well:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
All In One SEO Pack
So are keywords and keyword density a big deal. According to my research and Matt Cutts it’s not as much of a big deal as it was before 2011. Will this change in the future? Who knows! But for now, it doesn’t mean that they are not useful now in 2014.
As I mentioned before, they work well with components like Googles Knowledge Graph as well as other components! So I advice not to sleep on keywords and add them on each of your blog posts as long as you’re not keyword stuffing!
Now It’s Your Turn!
Do you use keywords on each of your blog post? Have you seen a difference in your traffic as oppose to not using them at all? How often do you add your keywords within your blog post? Do you believe that you can do without keywords? Please share your comments below and share this post with your friends. I look forward to read them!
