Search Optimization School

Keyword density and SEO go hand in hand. The search crawler has so many things to figure out when visiting your page and relevancy. The Google algorithm wants to know that you’re not a spammer, or trying to manipulate the rankings in any way. Sometimes they’re really good at this, other times – not so good. Every time they do any update to keep people from gaming the rankings, people find new loopholes and ways to game the engine.

Learning SEO is something that you learn in chunks, and I firmly believe that the more “bullets” you have in your arsenal – the more successful you’ll be overall. It’s important that you have the right keywords in the right places, but it’s also important that you don’t “overuse” them. That’s where keyword density and SEO come into play.

How keyword density and SEO works

Keyword density is a percentage of the total words you use in a post. Let’s say you had a short post of only 180 words, and had used a two word phrase 5 times in the textual content. Your “keyword density” could be 5.37%. Remove the “stop words” (common words like the, and, or – etc) and it might double to 10% or more.

If you’re writing articles to seed the search engines with original content, not learning about keyword density is like throwing away opportunities. Also, if you think you’re going to dominate search with 100 word posts that use your target keywords 5 times, that’s not going to work either.

Keyword Density and SEO Rules of Thumb

Here are some great rules of thumb to use when writing posts and pages for your web site.

• Write effective SEO titles (see yesterdays post)
• Write great original content with 400-800+ words per page
• Use images optimized with your keywords on each page (see post from 2 days ago)
• Keep the density for your target keyword phrase to 3-5% per page
• It’s best not to target more than one main keyword phrase per page, but if you must, try and keep it down to 2-3 phrases

There are online tools that you can use to generate keyword density percentages after your pages are published. Personally, I haven’t found these to be so reliable – but they are free.

You could also try the free wordpress plugin keyword statistics. You can set it up to use stop words (or not), and it will give you a pretty good picture of what your score is. I don’t like the fact that it only shows you keyword density and a percentage. It won’t tell you anything about headings or images at all.

The most professional keyword density tool I’ve seen to date is SEOPressor – which is a premium (but VERY affordable) plugin for WordPress. It gives you a keyword density score, and keeps track of all the areas that you’ve used your target keyword (headings, images, meta, etc.). If you’re serious about your rankings, that’s what I would use. I’ve been using it on all of my sites with good results for the last few months.

You could spend hundres of hours learning SEO, but learning “How to Write an SEO Title” for your pages is probably the most important thing that you could do. As I mentioned in the last post, google uses over 200 rankings signals to determine your fate in the results pages, but the one that is probably the heaviest weight of all is the title of your page. The “HTML title”.

This post contains information that you can use to SEO your title for any kind of web site, static HTML pages, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal – whatever you’ve got. I’m going to assume that whatever you have named the page in your web site software will become the HTML title. The HTML title is the tag in the head portion, it’s the text between the beginning and ending tags that say <title> and <title/>.

*Please note*: it DOES help if the URL of the page, the page heading AND the HTML title uses the same SEO keywords.

How the SEO title works

An HTML title should be 75 characters or less, because search crawlers generally won’t index more than that. Use the keywords that you think people will actually use in a Google search.

I’m naming this page “How to Write an SEO Title”, because that’s what I think people will search for to find this content. It could also be “Writing Effective SEO Titles”, “How the HTML title tag and SEO work”, etc. The important thing is that I have the keywords “SEO Title” in there with some natural language that’s relevant.

Why People Click Titles

The tricky thing is (that I hadn’t mentioned yet), you want your title to be SEO friendly and good for search engines, but you also want your title to be what they call “link bait”. In other words, use SEO words, but make the title something that people will actually want to click on. Entice them – make them think that if they don’t click they will be missing out. Don’t be spammy – but use a little marketing sense and optimize that title for both people and search engines

Original Content

I have 15 years experience working online, and in my experience Google is pretty good at figuring out you’re trying to get a good ranking. It knows the difference between making your title “SEO Title” and “My SEO Titles get 100X more clicks”. When your title contains more than just the keyword phrase alone with a little natural language, as long as your page content has strong original content – you stand a chance at getting a better ranking overall. When Google thinks that you’re writing good original content that people will want to read – you will be more successful every time!

Do you take advantage of image SEO? I mean, are images part of your SEO plan to get additional traffic for your web site? Do you use them to your advantage? When used properly, images can be a great SEO friendly tool.

Image SEO

Let’s say you have an article you’re posting, and you’ve optimized the title and the content for SEO. You’ve chosen some great keywords, used the appropriate categories and tags, and now you’re ready to publish it. Does the article contain an image? Did you use that image to your SEO advantage?

Google uses more than 200 ranking signals when indexing content, and the more signals you can influence with items in your article – the better.

There are 2 things you should know:

1. Images can help determine relevance
2. Images can be their own source of traffic

First of all, find or create an image (respecting copyrights of course) to use with your post. Save it to your desktop and change the file name to that of your target keywords. If your post is about “image seo” then the file name should be something like “image-seo.jpg”.

Insert that image in your post somewhere near the top of the page, I usually do it after the first few sentences or the first paragraph. When you insert the image give it both an alt and title tag “image seo”. Now you have the trifecta, the file name, and alt and title tag are the same as your target keyword phrase for the article. You’ve used the image to boost the relevance of your page in search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, one thing that you may not have known is, you’ve setup the image with it’s own filename based SEO keywords, and now the google image search crawler is going to pick that up and index it for google image search. You would be surprised how much traffic this can bring. I’ve had pages that ranked #1 in google image search for the picture, that brought visitors to the site that way – and I made all my money from monetization that way, rather than traditional search.

Case and point, I have an image indexed for furniture on another site, and for some reason people were searching for an image of what they wanted so they could see it and try to figure out what they wanted. Then they would click through, read the full post – and buy. This won’t work for all sites, but it sure will for many!

Using images to boost SEO is a solid practice, and something you should be using at all times in your site. If not, you’re just throwing some opportunities away!

One of the greatest ways to build authority links is by doing article marketing, and submitting to article directories. Of all the articles directories online – the one with the greatest authority, and highest popularity is by far Ezine Articles. They have a challenge going on right now (with prizes) to write 100 articles in 100 days (HAHD). A LOT of people have already signed up, and I did last night committing to follow through with 100 of my own articles. I just submitted my first two today – only 98 to go! I’ll keep you posted on my progress. You can read about it more in my HAHD Challenge post.

When you’re building backlinks – sometimes people forget that directory submissions are pretty much the best kind you can get! As they age they get even more valuable as the pageranks rise, and despite the fact that the higher pagerank directories charge a pretty penny for listings – you can still get listed for free in all kinds of free directories, many of which only require a reciprocal link back. Blog commenting is something you have to do constantly, but with a directory you only have to submit your site one time to get in!

Here’s 5 free directories to get you started:

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

If you want to know even more about directory submission (including where to find 500+ high pagerank directories), read my more in depth post High Pagerank Directories for Quality Backlinks.

Firefox SEO extensions can help you dramatically if you do SEO on a regular basis. For years many of us have been manually doing research by hand for the details we can gather on competing sites in SERP’s. You go to yahoo to check backlinks, you check indexed pages in google, you check Alexa ranking, you check domain age. You might even snoop around to see if the site has a sitemap or robots.txt file. It’s a time consuming ordeal – isn’t it?

Believe it or not, there’s a free extension for firefox that can do all these thing and more! It’s called “SEO Quake”. Once you install it, it has 2 “modes”. One is “toolbar” mode, and it can display all the SEO attributes about a site in a toolbar at the top of Firefox. The other is a “SERP” mode, where it can append the google results and tell you all the SEO attributes of search results as you research your competitors like this:

See how it appends each search result with pagerank, backlinks, alexa ranking, etc? You just have to be careful when you setup this plugin to have it get results “on demand” (only when you tell it to), or you can get your IP banned from search engines for too many lookups.

If you don’t want something that heavy duty, I’ll give an honorable mention to the SEO Firefox extension Search Status. It puts a very simple tool in the status bar of firefox which shows the pagerank and alexa rankings of sites you browse. This is very handy as well.

What Firefox SEO extensions do you use?

It’s been a hot debate for a really, really long time now, does image alt text count for SEO in web pages? I’ve probably seen this argued as many times as whether or not the meta keywords tag really matters for search indexing and SEO. After some research and trial and error over the years, I have to say that it does, but only for long tail keywords. If you’re targeting some broad search terms like “ipod nano” – sorry, the image alt text isn’t really going to help you against the stiff competition. However, if you’re targeting long tail keywords like “fix broken ipod nano” then alt text in images can really help you!

You see, broad terms are usually one or two words that get tens of thousands (or more) searches per day. Long tail keywords are 3+ works that are very targeted and usually get 5,000 or less searches per day. If you add your keywords into the alt text of an image on a page you’re trying to get ranked, I’m pretty certain that in most case it will boost you up there in the SERPs. Read my other post about it Image Alt Text: SEO or No SEO?, and I think you’ll agree.

Are you using keyword laden alt text on your sites now?

I just saw that the SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin was released as a submission entry in the 2009 WordPress Plugin Competition. Personally, I’ve used wpSEO for years now, which I wrote about on this blog, but many use kind of the de-facto standard for SEO in WordPress, All in One SEO Pack. Many have switched to Platinum SEO Pack because of it’s auto-handling of 301 Permanent Redirects and permalinks breaks.

The exciting thing about SEO Ultimate isn’t really what the plugin contains today, but what it plans to do in the very near future. It has some of the basic features that All in One SEO has, and it even (currently) does 404 Notification. But in the future you’ll have to ability to do robots.txt editing, 301 logging, and XHTML validation checks.

Check out SEO Ultimate, it may be the new WordPress plugin to watch!

I think that too many people forget how good internal inks are for SEO. If you want to increase your rankings in the search engines start linking your own posts on your blog! It will increase your listings in the Serps, but it will also be better for your blog because you will be highlighting and bringing up your old posts all the time.

When you write on a topic – link your previous posts about similar topics. In fact, think about installing a plugin like Aizatto’s Related Posts. You can create specific pages rounding up posts into a “series”. You can feature certain posts on your home page. All these are great ways to build internal links. There’s even a plugin called RB Internal Links that helps you browse for and find previous posts to link to using WordPress short codes.

Build internal links and watch your search rankings increase!

Commenting on other blogs is one of the best sources of traffic you can find and even better way to build backlinks. But how do you know that your time is being rewarded? You certainly don’t want to spend hours and hours leaving comments that are link dust in the wind do you? Here’s an example – let’s say that you are promoting your own business by leaving business cards on bulletin boards and check out counters. Would you waste your time leaving them in places where nobody would see them? Would you leave them in business that get virtually no customers at all? Of course not. You would leave them in the places that would do you the most good, big stores with with lots of customers.

So, due the same due diligence when leaving comments. First of all know what links are all about. Know that there is the normal way to (html) code them, and then there is the “nofollow” way. The “nofollow” tag added to an HTML hyperlink means that you link to something and tell the search engines to “ignore it”. So if you comment on a blog using “nofollow” tags the search engines will ignore the link above you comment. There is a “dofollow” movement, and dofollow WordPress plugins you can use to remove the nofollow tag blog-wide. All you have to do is search google for “dofollow blogs” to find seemingly endless lists of blogs that you can comment on that are more beneficial than others. The only thing I can think of better is to look for lists of dofollow blogs that have decent google pageranks. You could go a step beyond that and look for Alexa rankings under 100K too, but I think that a list of dofollow blogs with decent pagerank is a good start.

Do you have decent dofollow lists that you use? Comment below now……