Questions about Keyword Density In Blogging
By scheng1
@scheng1 (24650)
Singapore
May 9, 2009 8:03am CST
I always hear people say about keyword density in blogging.
Do they mean the occurrence of keywords in all the articles or just the keywords in a particular article? What is the ideal keyword density? 3%? 5%? 10%? per article or combination of all articles in the blog?
For example, health blog can talk about the benefits of water, fruit juice, exercising, mental health etc.
To obtain an optimum keyword density, must be the blog focus on drinking enough water for a lot of articles?
Or can the blog has one article on benefits of exercising and another on mental health? If the blog talks about different topics, and all relating to health, how on earth to have keyword density for all the articles in the blog? Very hard to have the same keyword for article on exercising and mental health.
1 person likes this
3 responses
@SpikeTheLobster (6403)
•
9 May 09
Keyword density is per-article, not per-site. This is because every article/page is individually crawled by the search engines and ranks on its own keyword criteria.
If you're thinking of ranking in blog directories, that might be affected by article subject density - but I've never seen it. It usually just depends on having a lot of visitors and links from other people. You know, the usual elitist things. 
Ideal density is a difficult question. Most people aim for between 2% and 10%. The 10% end sounds completely unnatural when the article is read, so I've rarely seen employers asking for that kind of repetition. Around 5% (i.e. once every 20 words or so) is about as high as you can go without sounding weird. Most articles aim for 2%-3%. Search engine crawlers ignore anything with too high a density, anyway.
If you're looking at SEO, may I suggest stopping off at HubPages.com - do a search for a guy called Peter Hoggan. He wrote a wonderful SEO guide, in several parts, on there: free, easy to understand and really, really good.
Ideal density is a difficult question. Most people aim for between 2% and 10%. The 10% end sounds completely unnatural when the article is read, so I've rarely seen employers asking for that kind of repetition. Around 5% (i.e. once every 20 words or so) is about as high as you can go without sounding weird. Most articles aim for 2%-3%. Search engine crawlers ignore anything with too high a density, anyway.
If you're looking at SEO, may I suggest stopping off at HubPages.com - do a search for a guy called Peter Hoggan. He wrote a wonderful SEO guide, in several parts, on there: free, easy to understand and really, really good.3 people like this
@SpikeTheLobster (6403)
•
10 May 09
Mr. Hoggan's a great teacher, but you're right - he's sometimes a bit too deep and involved for me, too!
One thing few people mention is that SEO writing is lower paid than "real" writing. Sounds odd, doesn't it? It's true, though: most employers will pay less for an SEO blog entry or article than they would for one written in proper English. I suppose it's because 3% of the words have already been written for you!!
2 people like this
@scheng1 (24650)
• Singapore
10 May 09
Thanks both of you for the help.
I am making an experiment now. I have update both blogs with long posts, keyword density about 4%, post length more than a thousand words.
I will not update anything for the next 2 weeks. Since this Peter Hoggan mentions that search engine takes about a week to index the article, I will let the 2 blog articles age for the time being.
A week later, if there is a significant increase in the traffic flow, I can attribute it to these 2 long articles.
If that is the case, I will do less frequent update, and upload longer article.
@pcsourcepoint (631)
• New Zealand
11 May 09
Good point for article writing - you can get visitors, and ranked up in search engine results with correct key wording. However I found some of my articles (and others that use hub pages/articles, etc) can end up getting them ranked higher than their own blogs (which they are trying to promote as well) in search engine results.
@scheng1 (24650)
• Singapore
11 May 09
Hi pcsourcepoint, the reason is very simple. Those article sites like Hubpages, Helium, Associated Content are designed to provide a lot of internal links, much more than is possible in a blog. Sometimes you read one article about retrenchment, a few related articles also appear. If your article is able to ride on the popularity of other articles, it will get view more often than articles in the blog.
Plus the sites usually exist longer than most blogs. The articles get synergy from the constant updating when writers keep on posting their articles, so the indexing is done more frequently.
@scheng1 (24650)
• Singapore
11 May 09
Hi Kalav, guess I'm a slow learner. I should check on this keyword density thing way before starting a blog. Now it's three months into the blogging and articles writing.
The same concept is actually applicable to article writing. Some writers in AC managed to get 500 page views per day for a single article, because of the keyword density.
@arcideaco (1257)
• Singapore
9 May 09
It should be referring to the number of times the said keywords are being used in the blog or post. It also extended to 'classes' and its relevant words relating to the searches. It is part of SEO. You may want to learn more about it with SEO.
About how percent, I am not so sure. But if it is excessively used, it can be regarded as a Spam site with the latest algorithm. I am not an expert on this.
Just my thoughts. Cheers.
@scheng1 (24650)
• Singapore
10 May 09
Hi Arcideaco, I have tried using those SEO tools to find out the keyword density, and it seems that they use all the words in my blog, including the title, my profile, and whatever else.
Yet I read elsewhere that search engine index individual post, that's why I got so confused. If one post talks about savings, with related keywords, and another post about wise spending, with related keywords. The keyword density for the front page of the blog (since each blog has about 7 articles in one page) is diluted. But keyword density for single post is ok.
