Should I Decrease My Keyword Density
-
On SEOmoz's On-page tool it is telling me that I should cut the number of phrases for a specific key phrase almost in half, from 27 to 15. However my keyword density for this page is only 1.68%. I would have thought that was a good keyword density to have, if not even a little higher.
Should I trust the tool and decrease this keyword phrase? Would love to hear from anyone with experience in this.
If you want to see the page it is http://www.mybluedish.com/. The key phrase is "satellite internet"
-
I agree with Stephen on trying to cut down the number(replace with related kw) and monitor the results . The motivation to do so is more about user perception rather than SERPs. Page looks good above the fold but becomes a bit less compelling as you go down .
The tools only provide suggestions (good ones actually) rather than edicts , on top of my head imagine running that tool on cars.com keyword "cars" .
As far as "KW density" this device from my understanding was meant to cultivate best practice ; to optimize for form and flow rather than trying to gain an edge in the SERPs (might not be KW density after all) . This article is old but I hope it helps in explaining KW density (or the non existence of).
Hope this helps . Cheerio
-
And remember... keyword density is a myth!!!!
I'm agree with Stephen.
This post can help you http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density
Bye
-
Haha, yeah I just had a look. 27 is a bit over the top!
Having said that, I don't know if you are being penalized for that. It scertainly looks spammy to the naked eye.
Cut the extreme repetitions, especially in the lists (footer, article lists) and monitor your rankings. If rankings go up, you probably had too many and cutting was good. If you have no movement, then the keyword density does not have much effect at all
Would appreciate a post back letting us know what you did and what effect it had
Cheers
Stephen
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 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
Keyword not ranking but keyword within a phrase is?
Hi Guys, Google is not indexing the keyword ‘e liquid’ for www.cloudstix.com/e-liquid and it's driving me insane. I cannot understand why, can anyone please shed any light! -On page we have used variations e liquid, e-liquid, eliquid. -The e-liquid product pages are canonicaled to www.cloudstix.com/e-liquid. -3 other pages regarding e liquid were 301 redirected to the page passing good authority. I did this as I believed these pages conflicted as they seemed to target e-liquid. -‘e-liquid’ is being used as an anchor throughout the website pointing to www.cloudstix.com/e-liquid. -The ‘e liquid’ page has generally good authority PA 22, DA26. -The website has good anchor text linking to the site, all relative and e liquid related, along with brand links. Currently the keyword ‘e liquid’ brings up the home page www.cloudstix.com ranked 100+. What’s strange is the other terms relating to 'e liquid' bring up www.cloudstix.com/e-liquid for example: ‘e liquid uk’ ‘the best e liquid’ and ‘e liquid cloudstix’. Any ideas on what the problem may be. Would appreciate any advice on this. Thanks guys! Liam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
301 / 404 & Getting Rid of Keyword Pages
I had a feeling that my keyword focused pages were causing my site not to rank well. I do not have that many keywords. I have 2 main keyword phrases along with 6 city locations. For example (fake) "tea house tampa" "tea house clearwater" "tea house sarasota" and "tea room tampa" "tea room cleawater" "tea house sarasota". So, I don't feel that I need that many pages. I feel like I can optimize my home page and maybe 1 or 2 topic pages. Right now, I have a keyword for each of those phrases. These are all internal pages on 1 domain. Not multiple domains. Sooo... I tested it by 301ing a few of my "tea house" KW pages to the home page. And low and behold... my home page rose BIG TIME! Major improvement! I'm talking like 13th to 2nd! Here is my question... how should I proceed? My SEO has warned me against 301ing too many pages all pointing to the home page. He says that will negatively impact my ratings. Should I 404 some pages? Should I build a "tea room" topic page and 301 that set there? What is worse? 301 or 404? How many is too many? I'm really excited by these results, but I'm scare to move forward and hurt what has happened. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
ECommerce keyword targeting: Blog post vs Category page
I'm targeting short head and chunky middle keywords for generating traffic to an ecommerce website. I guess I have two options both with great content: blog posts category pages with content (essentially the blog post). On the basis that it is great content that gets links, I would hope that I could garner links into the heart of the eCommerce website by doing this through option 2: category pages. Any thoughts on blog vs ecommerce category pages for tageting keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
Keywords Directing Traffic To Incorrect Pages
We're experiencing an issue where we have keywords directing traffic to incorrect child landing pages. For a generic example using fake product types, a keyword search for XL Widgets might send traffic to a child landing page for Commercial Widgets instead. In some cases, the keyword phrase might point a page for a child landing page for a completely different type of product (ex: a search for XL Widgets might direct traffic to XL Gadgets instead). It's tough to figure out exactly why this might be happening, since each page is clearly optimized for its respective keyword phrase (an XL Widgets page, a Commercial Widgets page, an XL Gadgets page, etc), yet one page ends up ranking for another page’s keyword, while the desired page is pushed out of the SERPs. We're also running into an issue where one keyword phrase is pointing traffic to three different child landing pages where none of the ranking pages are the page we've optimized for that keyword phrase, or the desired page we want to rank appears lower in the SERPs than the other two pages (ex: a search for XL Widgets shows XL Gadgets on the first SERP, Commercial Widgets on the second SERP, and then finally XL Widgets down on the third or fourth SERP). We suspect this may be happening because we have too many child landing pages that are targeting keyword terms that are too similar, which might be confusing the search engines. Can anyone offer some insight into why this may be happening, and what we could potentially do to help get the right pages ranking how we'd like?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
What to do with my keyword rich domainnames?
Hi, We have a holiday home rental business in Italy (Umbria). At this moment the language of the site is dutch and we targeting at the dutch and belgium market. We now in the fase of developing/adding 2 more languages, german and english. The url structure is going to is/be. dutch version (live)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcozwaan
domainname.com/nl
domeinname.com/nl/vakantiehuizen English (en) version (dev)
domainname.com/en
domeinname.com/en/villas
domeinname.com/en/villas/name-of-the-villa
domeinname.com/en/apartments
ect German (de) version (dev)
domainname.com/de
domeinname.com/de/ferienwohnung
domeinname.com/de/erienwohnung/name-of-the-ferienwohnung
domeinname.com/de/ferienhauser
domeinname.com/de/ferienhauser/name-of-the-ferienhauser
ect I have some registred some keyword rich domainnames like vakantiehuizeninumbrie.com (nl)
ferienwohnungumbrien.de (de)
ect question: Is it a good approach (seo wise) to point the keyword rich domainname to the specified landingpage. By example: point ferienwohnungumbrien.de to the page domeinname.com/de/ferienwohnung ? mille grazie! remco0 -
Could targeting 2 geographic locations decrease rankings?
Hello, I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords. My evidence for this: Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training" Also, our name, nlpca(dot)com indicates NLP California (CA stands for California in Google) The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again. A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it. We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to. Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0