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Why is keyword density important? Because, as I said earlier, it measures how often that particular word comes up. Keyword density is also known as keyword weight. The higher the percentage of keywords in relationship to other text, the higher your page will rank—to point. Many search engines, Google included, have gotten wise to the fact that extremely high keyword densities are probably contrived.

Here's an example of how keyword density it measured. Let's assume the keyword phrase is "cat food."

Cat food is our only business.

Since "is", "our," and other stop words are usually not counted, there are three "words" in the sentence: "puppy food," (which the search engine counts as one word, since that’s what it’s searching for), "only," and "business." "Cat food" composes 1/3 of the sentence, or 33%.

Realistically, keyword density is almost never this high, nor should it be or your copy will sound very contrived. The recommended density is 3-7%. This means that your keyword should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words.

Sure, that may not sound hard, but believe me--having 10 keywords and trying to repeat each one 3-7 times per 100 words of text is practically impossible. Instead of trying to do that (and having copy that sounds really weird), pick two or three of your most important keywords and try to use them 3-7 times for every 100 words.

So what about keyword frequency? Keyword frequency is a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a page's text. It's kind of related to the concept of keyword density. The thinking is that search engines want to see a word used more than once to make sure it’s something you’re really talking about. The best number of times to repeat a key word is 3-7 times.

Don't get overly clever and try to use tiny or invisible text to put keywords at the beginning of your pages. Search engines look for this, and when they find it they call it spam and they’ll probably reject your site for it.

So, in a nutshell, you want to:

* Include at least 100 words in page text
* Use keywords at the beginning of the page
* Place keywords close to each other
* Repeat keywords 3-7 times for every 100 words


3.2 Likes and dislikes of Googlebots


What’s a Googlebot? It’s one of the little web-searching spiders (automated) that I talked about in the last section. And these spiders have definite preferences, so you want to make sure your content is good spider food.


Spiders like:

* Neat code—less lines of code than lines of text (or more lines of text than lines of codes.)

* Normal keyword densities of 3-7%.

* Lots of backlinks on pages that link back to your home page. (Top sites have an average of 300 backlinks.)

* Original content not found anywhere else.

* Quick downloads of sites, which means not a lot of dynamic URLS to other sites.

* Site maps.

* ALT Tabs for images.

* Link partners who are contextually relevant to your page (i.e., if your page is about buying real estate, links might about be how to get loans, how to prospect for deals, how to start a corporation…but not about pet gerbils, latest fashions, or cell phones.

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