Does keyword density on a landing page effect SEO?
-
I'm relitavely new to SEO, and I just wondered how keyword dense the homepage to our businesses site should be? Is there any value in loading the frontpage at the potential expense of readibility, or should our content elsewhere be responsible for our yield in search engine results?
Look forward to any responses.
Thanks,
Mark
-
As people have said Keyword Density isn't really a thing. You do want to have the keywords you're targeting on the page, but you don't need to have every third word as a keyword
Here's some links to help you digest why keyword density isn't something to worry about:
Myths that persist (YOUmoz) - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density
Opinions on SEO Myths - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-opinions-on-the-seo-myths-realities-fight
Beginners guide part 9 - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-9-myths-and-misconceptions-about-search-engines
The fact they all have myth in them should give you an idea about how much credence it's given these days
-
Keyword Density is real but it's a red herring. KD is the limit that the various engines put on how often a term can appear before it's considered spam. The number is purely arbitrary and asking what it is is to invite you to run right up against it. If I were to tell you it's 15% would you tweak your page to 14%? Ignore KD and definitely avoid intentionally "loading" a page with terms.
Read your own content. Do you sound like a used car salesman or an infomercial? Would you change the channel on your own content? If so, Google will likely feel the same. Write naturally. That is the first law of SEO content.
-
Readability should always come first. Write it for your visitors not for search engines. Aside from that, make sure that your main keywords are on there once each and you should be fine
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
-
Using keywords in my URL: Doing a redirect to /keyword
My website in "On Page Grade" received an A.Anyway, I only have 1 thing to optimize:_"Use Keywords in your URL__Using your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links."_My website is ranking in top10 for a super high competitive keyword and all my others competitors have the keyword on their domain, but not for my URL.Since I can't change my domain for fixing this suggestion, I would like to know what do you think about doing a 301 redirect from / to mydomainname.com/keyword/So the index of my website would be the /keyword.I don't know if this can make a damage to my SERP for the big change ir it would be a great choice.
On-Page Optimization | | estebanseo0 -
Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS. My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Re-naming pages without affecting SEO
Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as: brand.com/page/pagename/number I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as: brand.com/pagename First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?
On-Page Optimization | | maxweb1 -
Keyword usage in eCommerce Sites - Danger of keyword stuffing?
Hi all, I'm having a little difficulty deciding the best approach for selecting my product titles as I've encountered a few issues. I understand how important it is to try and use the keyword in your product titles, but about the category page that lists all of these products? One of category pages, for example, has 16 products on it. Each has the product title followed by the keyword. I have also used the keyword in the category title, URL, breadcrumbs and two or 3 times (because it was natural) in a paragraph that describes the category etc. Due to the little amount of text on the page, and the sheer amount of times that the keyword is being used, it looks like I am keyword stuffing (By Moz On Page Report Card). I think it came to 23 uses of the same keyword altogether. This is the pretty much teh same throughout every category page on my site, and think I was penalised by Google for this reason. I'm a relatively new site and have done everything by the book as far as I know, so everything is pointing at this to be the cause of the drop/disappearance in ranking. How do I rectify this problem? It's important for the products to have the keyword in, right? As this is one of the SEO practices that is given more weight when considering rankings. I have thought a potential way around this, which is to split the keyword between an exact match, and a variant of the keyword in the titles - only very slightly though. So my product titles would look like 'Product A Exact Match Keyword', 'Product B Variant on Keyword' etc. Could this work? Can anybody advise on the best thing I could try? I have attached an image to give you an idea of the layout of my category pages - Apologies in advance about my embarrassingly rubbish photoshop skills! I wasn't able to upload directly, so I have attached a link. Thanks for reading, John 4iIkmSx
On-Page Optimization | | John_Francis0 -
We have 5 postions on page 2 in a google search, but none on page 1\. How can we fix this?
For one of our most important key phrases we have 5 listings on page 2 but none on page 1. We are an ecommerce company, the key phrase we're trying for is a Top Level Category name for us, so the 5 links we have on googles second page for the key phrase (in order) are the appropriate top level category page, the sites home page and than three sub categories of that top level category. So while that all makes sense, can't we convince google to concentrate all that link power/juice into just the top level category page? Hopefully bumping it to first page rank? The 5 ranks are 11-15
On-Page Optimization | | absoauto0 -
Best SEO extension or plugin for on-page optimization
I was wondering what you guys might recommend for a browser extension or plugin that would help developers optimize each page for specific keywords. I'm looking for a tool that will give me a grade on how well it's optimized with a recommendation checklist. I would use SEOMoz's onpage analysis tool but it doesn't have access to my private development environment (hence the need for a plugin.) Recommendations? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | net32SEO0 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1