Google Small Business

What do you know about keywords? Essentially, they educate the search engines about your content. However, using too many is a bad thing. Keyword density is vitally important and you should learn how to get this right to achieve a perfect combination.

Besides straightforward keywords and appropriate density, there are other ways to optimise. You can use keyword phrases. Nowadays, many keywords have become commonplace. For example, if you put “chocolate” into a search engine, you will get millions of returns. It is possible that people could wade through 10 pages of results, which they probably are not going to do, and still be confused.

Now, they will try a different tactic. As an example, they might enter “chocolate peanut butter candy.” This is definitely more specific. If you are in the business of selling recipes, then you would be much better off using the second phrase instead of just that one key word.

A Keyword Myth.

When it comes to online business development, you might think that common sense is the best approach to keyword selection, but you are not always right. You might mistakenly think that if a particular keyword is the right one to attract customers, you should use it everywhere. Theoretically, you are correct.

This next part is where many veer off the track. You don’t want to be stuffing your content so that it appears to be a keyword sandwich. This might have been okay at one time but search engines have become much smarter. The engines know that a keyword would not ordinarily appear every third sentence in a content piece. This is generally called keyword stuffing.

Keyword Density.

A typical search engine is difficult for the average person to understand as it is composed of a tricky mix of algorithms. All we know is that it tells the bots to do their thing and they do it. They will look for keywords according to the individual requests and search tens of thousands of sites and blogs as they go about indexing accordingly.

The calculation of keyword density tells us how many of those words appear within a specific piece of text. As an example, a 500 word article should contain a given number of keywords appropriate to that piece of text. Internet gurus used to always say that a safe keyword density was anywhere from 3-10%.

Search engines do not think this way however, and have their own ideas about correct density. Now, it can be as low as 1-3%. For a 500 word article, that would be 5-15 occurrences for any keyword. Most err on the lower end just to be safe. After all, if you encountered the same keyword 15 times in a 500 word article you would likely think this to be strange, depending on the subject matter.

The keyword density also considers the number of words in the targeted keyword. Long tail online business marketing has become popular and can further focus your content and website for a larger, well-defined market.

Keyword density is appropriate for your website development, generally. When setting up your site, use the keyword in picture tags, subheadings, headlines and anchor text. Good content will get people to visit you time and again, but the composition of your website will be fundamental to helping you achieve and then stay at the top of the first page of search results.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting-edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Now!