The Trick to Proper Keyword Density
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Simple Trick to Achieve Proper Keyword Density.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: Thank you for joining us today for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking today with Dave Young who is the founder of Shortcut Content. And, Dave, tell me about keyword density and how that might help drive traffic to your website.
Dave: Keyword density is one of those search engine optimization terms that’s been around a long time and opinions vary as to whether it’s something that you really should pay attention to these days or whether search engine can automatically figure out what your page or your blog post or an individual page on your site is all about. And we have different customers at Shortcut Content that do their blogging for a couple of different reasons. One is that it’s just a good relationship deepener and it’s a good place to tell stories and that’s all great stuff. In fact, those are the kinds of things that are way more sharable on social media than just writing about a specific topic, because want you Google to pay attention to you.
But our number one tip for how to make sure that you get the proper keyword density on a page or a blog post is really a pretty simple one. Let me show it to you. You take a sticky note, like this, and this one happens to say, “Proper Keyword Density,” and we take that, when we’re recording it, when we have these recording sessions via Skype with our customers, we’ll have the customer take that little sticky note and just stick it on the monitor right up there, somewhere near your camera, somewhere near your screen so that it’s in your field of view, and in my case, as I’m recording video for this as well, it’s in my field of view, just below where I can see the camera.
So when I’m recording a post about proper keyword density, that thing is right in my field of view, and I’ll naturally just say that every now then because it’s right there, and it keeps my mind focused on the topic at hand and it helps me to say that keyword in the right…people that pay close attention to keywords want them to be exact, so instead of saying the “right keyword density,” or what’s the “optimal keyword density,” if I’m trying to rank a page and I’m an SEO guy and I’m trying to rank it for the term “proper keyword density,” I want to say that as opposed to “optimal” or “best” or “how to get the right number of keywords on a page,” those kinds of things.
If you over-do this, this is the big risk, if you over-do it, you end up with writing that seems a bit robotic, like it’s almost just written for search engines, as opposed to people. And while you do want search engines to like your content, the risk of writing it just so search engines get it is that people won’t. And you tend to lose some of your audience if that’s your entire focus. So when I was researching this just a little bit, there are still varying opinions on how important proper keyword density, there I said it again, on just how important that is in the content that you’re developing. And some SEO people say that’s it’s still important, and some say that it’s way less important and that search engines have natural ability to figure out what the keyword is on a page, given the context of the page, and even it’s link profile. And by that I mean the pages that are linking to that page, especially based on that keyword.
So that’s what I’m talking about by proper keyword density, and, again, our trick for just making sure that our customers achieve that, if that’s their goal on a given post that they’re recording, is that sticky note that’s right there where my eyes can see it.
Shayla: And if you have any questions about this topic you can go to shortcutcontent.com where you can find Dave and his team. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.