How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
-
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content.
They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it.
Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter.
Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader.
Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates?
Thoughts appreciated.
Thanks Craig
-
Remember some points.
Allow H1 one time in the article.
Allow H2 two time in the article.
Allow H3 three time in the article.
Allow strong tag 3 time in the article. Note use strong tag not bold.
Allow underline tag 3 time in the article.
Allow italic tag 3 time in the article.
Keyword Density 1% in the article.
Always remember that content is king. simply focus on delivering high quality content.
-
That's a great response, thank you, really helpful.
What about making sure the first instance of your keyword is in bold close to the start of the body text?
Again I get mixed views on this.
Thanks
Craig
-
When a user types in a search, Google typically relies on HTML elements to match the content on your site to that specific query. Without optimizing key HTML elements (title, body content, headers etc..), you won't be able to rank, it's as simple as that.
For now, the following diagram should help explain the basics of which elements need keyword research attention:
The "Perfectly" Optimized Page(for the example keyword phrase "chocolate donuts")
Page Title: Chocolate Donuts | Mary's Bakery
Meta Description: Mary's Bakery's chocolate donuts are possibly the mostdelicious, perfectly formed, flawlessly chocolately donuts ever made.
H1 Headline:Chocolate Donuts form Mary's Bakery
Image File name: Body Text________________________
cocolate-donuts.jpg chocolate donuts__ ____________________________________ donuts ____________________________________ ____________________________________ chocolate donuts ____________________________________ __________________________________________________________ donuts____ __________________________________________________________ chocolate__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ chocolate donuts________________ __________________________________________________________ _____________________________chocolate __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ ________________________chocolate donuts __________________________________________________________ Page URL: http://marysbakery.com/chocolate-donuts Ultimately you want to attract visitors who are going to convert into customers, if you can identify keywords which will lead to more conversions, you are more likely to see a good ROI.
Google in particular is becoming much more advanced at predicting the intent of searchers. For example, if you search for "apple," are you looking for the fruit or the technology company? Through a lot of user testing and machine learning, Google has determined that its users are probably looking for the technology company. Hence Apple's #1 position on Google.
While you do not have much control over this, user intention should be a priority when you are choosing and filtering your keywords. You want to be targeting keywords where the intention is likely to lead to a conversion for your business.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Difference keyword and co-occurence
Could someone explain me what the difference between a keyword and a co-occurence is ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Combining images with text as anchor text
Hello everyone, I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy. Here is an example (I'll keep it simple): Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories: Christmas Classical Traditional So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like: Christmas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
Classical
Traditional Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like: "christmas violin sheet music" "classical violin sheet music" "traditional violin sheet music" I would be tempted to make the above links as follows: Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these: Christmas
Classical
Traditional That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs. My questions are: 1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint? 2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!1 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Which automatic redirects to use in International SEO
Hi, I need help with international SEO redirects. I'm going to have intelligencebank.com/au for Australian visitors and intelligencebank.com for the rest of the world. I would like to automatically redirect aus users that land on .com to .com/au and vice versa for non-australian users. 1. Which automatic redirects should I use: a) java script because it will allow US based google bots to crawl my /au website (bots won't read javascript so they won't be redirected) b) http redirects c) 301 redirects d) 302 redirects e) anything else? a) Should I still use rel alternate even though I only use english? b) if I should add rel alternate, can I still keep my existing rel canonical tags that are use to avoid duplicate content (I use a lot of utm codes when advertising)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intelligencebank0 -
WordPress redesign: using posts as pages?
Starting a redesign for an attorney who is currently using WordPress with an old framework that is no longer being supported, so I'm going to install a new WP and start from scratch. The site consists of about 30 static pages (practice areas, attorney profiles, etc.) and they write about 5 blog posts per month. I've always differentiated between posts and pages for WP sites I've done in the past, but this time around I thought it might be more clean (less files, and easier for their webmaster to make routine edits) if I just brought over the static pages as posts. However, the recent webinar on the Yoast SEO plugin mentioned using the month/day in the permalink structure for posts to avoid duplicate content issues. That would go against how I was thinking of setting it up, because I would have just generated the URL off the page title and make a separate category for "pages". Just wondering if anyone's used posts as pages before. While this seems like it would make things easier for the webmaster, I'm not sure it maximizes potential for SEO. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c2g0 -
What would be the SEO benefits of using Lulu ? (ebook)
Hi there, how are you guys doing? We wrote an ebook to promote our new website and I was investigating the idea of putting it on Lulu. Did anyone ever use Lulu? If so, do you have any feedback please? I got a free ISBN number on Lulu and it looks like I may be able to distribute it on Amazaon. Also, I'm giving out the ebook for free. Thanks guys! I hope you're having a great day
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ericc220 -
Keyword Self-Cannibalization Concern
Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JerDoggMckoy2