My experimentation with Keyword Densities.
Since the death of keyword meta-tags, keyword density ranges seem to have become a lot more important.
They’ve also become very controversial.
Here’s the thing: inside the box thinking will tell you that you should have a high enough keyword density—at least 7% Makes good sense or does it? What I have seen is that of all the pages I have studied Keyword densities have between 5% and 7%.
Go for higher if you chose But do you want to raise a red flag when the spiders come crawling over your content? If your keyword density is 20% or more, the search engine will most likely red-flag you for “keyword stuffing” and penalize your site. (I’m sure this will cause some debate, so be it)
But who really knows what the SE’s are doing with their funky math nonsense. Go with what works between 5 and 7% works. The only way you can tell the search engines what your page is about is by the keywords you use.
Those keywords don’t necessarily have to be right on the page.
They should also be in the title and in the links (anchor text) that will point at your internal pages.
Oh in case you were unaware: Keyword density refers to the ratio of keywords to the total number of words on the page. If the total number of words in the body is 1004 and the the total number of times that your keyword appears is 26 then 26/1004 = 2.6% Easy math?. You bet.
But how much does that stuff matter? What do you think, look at the examples. Your answer is right in front of you.
Just a note though from the months of experimentation on various test pages, as simple as Keyword Density is, it can also get really complex in a hurry. Adding plurals or other variations and synonyms of your keyword also affects what ad types display.
Just by way of example you’re reading this because you want to make money blogging.
How many different synonyms for make money are there?
Lets look at the word money:
Here are the synonyms for money; currency ,Almighty Dollar, banknote, bankroll, beans, bill, boodle, bread*, bucks*, cabbage, capital, cash, check, chicamin, chips, coin, coinage, dinero, dough*, ducats, filthy lucre, finances, fund, funds, gold, gravy*, green, green stuff, greenback*, hard cash*, jack, kitty, legal tender, long green, loot*, lucre, mazuma, moolah, pay, payment, pesos*, property, resources, riches, roll, salary, scratch, silver, skin, specie, sugar, treasure, wad*, wage, wampum, wealth, wherewithal*
Now for the keyword make;
Make, create, accomplish, adjust, arrange, assemble, beget, brew, bring about, build, cause, compose, conceive, constitute, construct, cook, cook up*, dash off*, draw on, dream up, effect, engender, fabricate, fashion, father, forge, form, frame, fudge together, generate, get ready, hatch, initiate, invent, knock off*, knock out, lead to, manufacture, mold, occasion, originate, parent, prepare, procreate, produce, put together, secure, shape, sire, spawn, synthesize, tear off, throw together*, whip, whip out* destroy (weird one I know)
Another question that frequently appears in forums about optimizing Adsense content is:
Should you include off-page content, like meta tags and titles, in your pages? The answer is YES Look at the examples I give in this post series.
What about keyword frequency or how close each keyword is to another? Or how prominent a keyword is? In some cases they’re right next to each other and in other examples they’re with 3 or 4 words of each other.
Just by way of example I was studying a problogger.net post to see how he gets a page 1 ranking for his keywords. Make money blogging. Look at how many times he uses those keywords.
Oh I should mention too that this is NOT a post about SEO. what I know about SEO wouldnt fill a teaspoon. (IMHO)
Just bear in mind that if your keyword densities gets too high, search engines just might realize it and penalize your page.
Go do this: Do a Google search for your keyword, of course what you’re going to look for are the sites that have Adsense on them. Then run the above analysis on the first ten sites. Take a good hard look at the results. From this, you should get a good idea how your page ads will compare with them in Google, at least in terms of keyword density. This will also work as an SEO tool too. But for this AdSense optimizing post series we’re focusing on how to get relevant ads.
Reminder: Your goal is to serve Relevant AdSense Ads. And making them part of the viewing experience and overall theme of your blog or website.
Here’s a nifty little search tool for other related words to your main and secondary keywords you’re using to optimize your pages for
See that little squiggly key on your keyboard beside the number 1 (~) its called the tilde. A geek friend of mine showed me this tool.
Go to Google and type in your keyword with the tilde ~ in front of it.
For example ~finance. Google will return related words in bold. Open up a notepad and note these down and do other tilde searches around the terms you find. Use these on the pages and posts. That way you can be DEAD certain that Google will find your pages relevant and serve you relevant ads.
If you have the money for it I recommend you get Keyword elite. (aff link) You can do the very same analysis in about 2 mins and get a much more detailed report.
Doing it with firefox is a little more work and provides you with some very cool insights both for Adsense and SEO.
You do it like this using keyword elite. In this example I’m using the Keyword Home Improvement Because I have a site that’s going to be launched in that niche, ( I spent a number of years working in that industry so I know a thing or two about what problems people get themselves into). note I don’t want this to sound like a pre-sell for Keyword elite. It’s quite simply the best keyword research tool software there is. It is expensive I will say that but well worth the money for the results it provides and the time it saves.
So I want to see what the top pages are doing to optimize their page ads. I have checked first that they’re using Google Adsense.
So I open up Keyword elite, start a new project “analyze keyword competition”
Drop in my Keyword. I do this multiple times for different keywords. After I have fire foxed those pages.
Then I drop in the urls for the pages I am looking at.
SURVEY SAYS !!!
Well lookey lookey !!!! Some very high keyword densities aren’t there. Between 9% and 50% in the title.
But small keyword densities in the body text. It would be interesting to know if they’re doing split testing wouldn’t it?
Don’t get all freaked out : if you go and do that with three or four different tools, you will no doubt come up with different numbers, those numbers will look very similar.
Don’t worry your pretty head about it, because the numbers aren’t the most important thing. You’re only concerned with how they compare to each other. As you can see the three examples above are similar.
What you really want to know from your analysis is the range of keyword density values that produce relevant ads. Just remember, though, the numbers are guidelines you should know, not tatooed on your head rules that forever determine your AdSense relevant ads.
Experiment! You may hear self-proclaimed website gurus say that keyword density should always run between two and eight percent or whatever the current numbers being quoted in forums across the Internet happen to be.
I have found that to be somewhat true. Those numbers are probably fairly accurate for most keywords. BUT every keyword is different and treated differently by google. They’re based on averages and it’s always good to stick close to an average.
Remember what I said earlier about not sounding awkward in your content? Well, the biggest thing about keyword density is that it must read well and sound very natural to a user.
It’s useless to get highly keyword targeted ads if your content is all keywordy and reads weird like a robot wrote it. Remember you’re doing keyword research to produce content that will serve highly targeted and relevant AdSense ads that are a part of the theme and viewing experience of your blogs or websites.
Remember you want people to click the ads because they’re relevant to your content.
Some keywords are easy to use a lot of while still sounding natural. For instance, if your keyword was “music” on a site about mp3’s, it wouldn’t be hard to use it lot.
Here’s the choice to be made: you can use an average range, which will work well most times, or you can spend time analyzing the top ten pages to find the best range for that particular keyword.
Frustrated? Don’t be! It isn’t that hard. If you’re still confused, check out a competitor’s page in Google’s cache (which highlights the keywords for you) to get a good visual feel for density.
AND you’re going to have to do “reality check, or head check” on your page content. This is going to sound weird but find a friend or your Dog if you have no friends and read your content to them.
Reading your keywordy content out loud to them and see how it sounds, Look it should sound like you’re actually explaining something or what ever the basis of your content is. This is what will make the copy sing and keep users coming back. Then take a hard look at your content.
For instance, if your keyword is “bicycle”, instead of a sentence saying, “my bike is for riding and I like to ride my bike and bicycles are great for riding because summer is the best time to ride bicycles you should consider a bicycle as a part of your excercise routine,” say, “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike.” (Ok I like the band Queen) It’s what I’m listening to right now. Hahahahaha.
Ok thats enough about keyword research to gain some relevant Adsense ads. For today anyways!!
The rest of the AdSense optimizing and relevant AdSense ads posts:
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