Keyword Density

[haynes8]

Does the keyword density affect your site rank in the search engines. And if so what is the best way to improve keyword density. Right now I have a site ... it is #27 in google for search term honda rebel forum, but dosent rank at all for search term honda rebel. I would like to know how to make it rank better in search engines.

[eurodomain]

Concentrate more on OFFSITE SEO!
Get incoming links with anchor text "honda rebel forum" and "honda rebel" - because that has MUCH more weigh than having the keyword density fine-tuned.

You can rate at #1 position for keywords that are NOT even mentioned on your site - just have enough incoming links with that key! Search for "Google Bomb" to get more info about this phenomenon.

>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

[bryanbell]

When search engine index your site, there are many factors used by the search engine. The search engine uses both on page and off page factors. And in the on page the keyword density is the key factor. Keyword density means how many times the specific keywords displays on your page. Many people think that keywords that used more times get high ranking. But it is not true because if you do this your site marked as a spam for doing keyword stuffing on the web page. So to increase keyword density you use keyword into your title. Also insert keyword into your heading and content but maintain proper percentage of keywords on the web page. Put your keyword into image ALT tag also use keyword into your URLs.

[rjonesx]

Hey folks. Let's answer these issues sequentially:

1. Keyword Density: No, this does not matter. Period. At most, another metric called Tf/Idf (term frequency over inverse document frequency) might matter, but this is old-school text relevance stuff that is no longer that valuable. For on-site, keyword location matters the most (title, meta description, first image alt text are the only items that have been shown to correlate with higher rankings). Another metric, Latent Dirichlet Allocation relevancy, has been shown to correlate as well - but it is essentially just saying "write relevant content".

2. Off-Site SEO: Yes, this matters the most. But right now you need to be risk-averse in terms of the anchor text that you acquire. The bulk of your links need to either use the URL or your brand name as the anchor text. For example, if your domain name is "freeforexsoftware.com", your anchor text needs to be either "freeforexsoftware.com" or "Free Forex Software" most of the time. Use brand anchor text and URL anchor text like this to build up your site authority, then leverage that with a smaller percentage (less than 15% per term) going to specific terms for which you would like to rank, like Forex Software or Forex.