Keyword Frequency
What is Keyword Frequency?
The first search engine optimisation topic most people come across is meta tag creation. Creating the right meta information is the be all and end all of traffic building as far as many webmasters
are concerned. Although there are many other areas we consider to be equally imporant - link popularity, site navigation issues to name just two, successful meta tag creation is still fundamental to the SEO process.
We have already covered the meta tag basics earlier, now we are talking about Keyword Frequency. Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword
phrase appears within a web page. Many times it is considered as keyword density, but here on SEO101 we would like to discuss this topic as a individual article, although SEO101 tried to make it as simple as we can but if you didnt undestand any concept or anything, SEO101 advice
you to contact us for further clarification.
Keyword Frequency algorithms will vary from engine to engine. What page text is indexed will also vary. But, fundamentally, if your keyword (or phrase) occurs 5 times in every 100 words viewed by a search engine, your keyword density will be 5%.
Frequency counts will often vary depending on whether you selected exact matching on the first tab of the Page Critic screen. Frequency will also vary depending on whether you enable partial matching. In addition, if you perform a case-sensitive search by including one or more upper case letters in your keyword, then your frequency count may vary.
The theory is that the more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engine is likely to give the page for a search with those keywords. Now this therory is no longer applied to modern search engines. Search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista, consider this as a keywords
spamming or keyword stuffing.
You don’t want to go overboard with frequency since many engines will penalize you for “keyword spamming” if they feel you were excessive. In general though, SEO101 thinks that you should use your keyword in the document in as many different areas as you can, and as many times as is recommended for that engine.
Now lets talk about it some more here with SEO101.
Why is the keyword frequency so important?
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and AltaVista display results based on secret algorithms. No outsiders know the equations, but we all know that these are based mainly on keyword frequency and link popularity.
In general, SEO101 recommends that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.
But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.
Many “experts” would recommend a keyword frequency of between 3% and 8% (i.e. the keyword would appear between 3 and 8 times per 100 words in the document). In reality, you won’t be able to optimise every single page of your site so precisely, however this is a general guide used by many web marketing people.
Keyword Frequency Solution #1:
There are many free SEO tools like keyword density analysers or keyword frequency analyser, use these free tools for a quick analysis of your content page and take a closer look at results of keyword density of your page. Hopefully your page has readable
content, but the meta information has been primed according to the content - not the other way round. A quick analysis using the tool below shows the phrases we wanted to promote (keyword density, keyword
frequency, etc.) are around the 8% mark. This seems about right, although a mildly higher one would do no harm at all since the content is obviously related to the subject matter. SEO101 suggests if it is needed that you use more keywords in artice or you figured out your keyword frequency is exceeding the acceptable limit, then we think solution #2 might be a better option for you.
Keyword Frequency Solution #2: Keyword Proximity
Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.
For example:
How Keyword Density Affects Search Engine Rankings
How Keyword Density Affects Rankings In Search Engine
Using the example above, if someone searched for “search engine rankings” a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.
The reason is because the keywords are placed closer together. This is assuming that everything else is equal, of course.
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