SEO Tip of the Week: Keyword Density

SEO Tip of the Week: Keyword Density

90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us tips on keyword density of a web page in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.

As you probably know, Google is making a bigger deal around quality of text on your site. There is a debate about whether more or less words is good. All I really know is that whatever words you have it’s important to get the themes and focus on the content and of your site right.

Tip 1: webmaster tools has a really useful report that gives you the most used keywords on your site. It doesn’t account for ‘stop words’; these are words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘but’ and so on. From that you can get a real sense of the thematic consistency of your whole site.  I believe it helps Google understand the focus of your site so it upweights your site around certain queries.

The URL is:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords

The data looks like this:

Keyword Occurrences Variants encountered
seo 1761 seo, seo’s, seos
digital 1655 digital, digital’s
brand 677 brand, brands, brand’s, branding
march 600 march
reputation 470 reputation, reputations

Tip 2: when i want to visualise the keyword densities on a given page I use a combination of 2 tools – SEO Book keyword density tool and Wordle.
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
http://www.wordle.net/advanced

I add the URL of the page I’m interested in to the SEO book tool and it then gives me 3 lists:
1 word frequency
2 word phrase frequency
3 word phrase frequency

If I’m interested in the thematic focus of a page and I want to match it up against a phrase I want to rank on, i.e. ‘online casino bonus’ then I’m interested in the 3 word phrase densities.

I copy this 3 word list into excel: it might look like this

3 Word Phrases Count
online casino bonus 8
best online casino 7
online casino bonuses 4
uk casino club 3

I then add another parameter so it looks like this:

online casino bonus : 8
best online casino : 7
online casino bonuses : 4
uk casino club : 3

And add this to wordle here: http://www.wordle.net/advanced

it then generates a keyword cloud that looks like this:

Casino action (1st place google.co.uk ‘online casino bonus’) :

nick-garner-seo-tip-of-the-week-keyword-density-video1

10th place for ‘online casino bonus’ looks like this:

SEO Tip of the Week: Keyword Density

Of course you will ask why No1 should rank even though the page doesn’t look like its optimised for that keyword…it’s because http://www.casinoaction.com/  has about 18 times the number of referring domains than www.bestonlinecasino-bonus.co.uk which ranks No10

As a result according to SEMRUSH Google.co.uk keyword database, bestonlinecasino bonus is ranking across about 19 significant phrases,  whereas Casinoaction is ranking across 290 phrases. So it means casino action is seen as far more authoritative and so even though he keyword densities are not great, it will outrank sites with far better onsite subject focus.

Recap:

  • Web master tools for overall keyword themes across the whole site.
  • Visualising keywords I use a combination of SEO Book keyword density tool and wordle
  • A site that’s perfectly focus on a phrase or subject, but has no links will be beaten by a site with not great thematic focus, but a ton of good links.