The Lowdown on Keyword Density - White Hat
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Not all methods of utilizing keywords are unscrupulous. White hat techniques are recognized by web development professionals and search engines alike. Rather than lying about the content of a web site, it is more like organizing the content of a web site in such a way that it best markets it to both people and search engines.
This is not entirely obvious if you are not sure exactly what the search engines are looking for. The good news is that quite a bit of it is done naturally if you just develop a website for visitors.
One search engine measurement tool that has traditionally been considered valuable (but is somewhat less so today) is keyword density. The idea behind this is that search engines look to see how many times a keyword shows up on a web page. Now, they also take advantage of synonyms and intelligent analyzers to give more value to the pages that really deserve it. Different algorithms differ, but they all take a look at the density of the keywords on the page.
Different search engines give different values, but it has been suggested to have anywhere between two percent to eight percent keyword density on every web page. That is, between two and eight of every 100 words should be a keyword. This can be difficult to measure with words that are not quite key words or ones that have similar meanings, but there are free tools online that can help you if you are having some trouble.
A better way to gain value with keywords is by placing them in prominent locations on the web page. The URL, title, and headers are all great places to get keywords noticed by both users and search engines. This is probably something that most people already do for their human visitors, so it is not really a big concern.
One neat technique is keyword proximity. Two keywords next to each other are more valuable than when they are apart. For instance: "small business website design" is more valuable than "we do website design and work with small business." People are more likely to enter the first phrase into search engines, which will then return results as close to the searched phrase as possible.
In summary, it is best to utilize white hat techniques when considering keyword density for a website. They ensure that both search engines and users will get the most value out of your website.
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