The Lowdown on Keyword Density
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"Keyword” is a term often used by various people; however, few people actually understand what keywords have to do with websites and search engines. It may seem apparent that “search” and “engine” would be keywords for Google, but can we actually apply a definition to “keyword” in general that will help us understand it?
A keyword is actually-more or less-any word that appears on a web page. These are the words that make up a web page. Whenever you read a website, you are actually unconsciously processing all of the keywords on the page. The words that stand out most to you are most likely the "key" words.
Although this concept seems relatively straightforward to the human brain, it is actually somewhat difficult to quantify the value of a word relative to the rest on the page. Initially, it was thought that the ideal method was to simply count the number of times a word appeared on the page. The more times it appeared, the more important the word was.
However, what happens if, knowing this fact, somebody making a web page simply repeats the same word over and over on a web page?
The study of keywords has come a long way since the original development of the Internet. There were many flaws in keyword interpretation and analysis in the old days, but the technologies and methods have been developed to the point that keywords can be automatically detected and ranked accurately.
Since the detection algorithms have become more complex, it has become more difficult for people to fool the search engines with tricky tactics. However, there are still methods that can be used to organically produce better search engine results by utilizing the known methods of keyword density analyzers. These are known as white hat methods. The unscrupulous methods mentioned before are, likewise, named black hat methods.
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