Index	Previous Page (14)	Next Page (16)

Letters aren’t an even distribution. Neither are keyword. Big shock, huh? 

Remember what I said earlier about not sounding awkward in your content? Well, the biggest thing about keyword density is that it must read well and sound very natural to a user. It’s useless to get a page one ranking if your content is very lame.

Like the letter E, some keywords are easy to use a lot of while still sounding natural. For instance, if your keyword was “grass” on a site about lawn care, it wouldn’t be hard to use “grass” a lot.

But some keywords just don’t lend themselves to being used a lot—like “quince.” (It’s a type of fruit.) Here’s the choice to be made: you can use an average range, which will work well most times, or you can spend time analyzing the top ten pages to find the best range for that particular keyword and be sure you're not trying to optimize for a Z or a quince.

Frustrated? Don’t be! It isn’t that hard. If you’re still confused, check out a competitor's page in Google's cache (which highlights the keywords for you) to get a good visual feel for density.

Another good tip is to perform a “real person sanity check” on your content. Reading your optimized content out loud several times, and try to get a natural flow that will make the copy draw users who will come back. Then take a hard look at your content. If you can substitute a keyword for a pronoun without loosing your flow, do it.

For instance, if your keyword is “hammock”, instead of a sentence saying, “I love to lie in it,” say, “I love to lie in my hammock.”


4.1 Do-it-Yourself SEO



There are a ton of free online SEO tools available on the internet. Most feature some very impressive statistics and information to help you optimize your website, analyze search engine positions, research your competitors, and lots of other things.

There are two ways you can use these free online SEO tools:

(1) If you’re new to SEO, these tools provide excellent insight on how a website is performing and ranking. Use them to highlight issues and trends with your website and provide indicators for where optimization work is necessary.
(2) If you’ve had some experience with SEO, these tools will act as a complement to the more specialized SEO tools, like WebPosition Gold or SpyderOpts. You can also use them to supplement an SEO’s internal knowledge base and experience.


Here are some choice tools for both new SEO users and more experience SEO users:

Keyword Research Tool
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml/
Use this to research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage's body text so that you’ll rank higher. It’s easy to use. You just enter the word or phrase you want to be found under, then the tool suggests additional words and phrases for you to consider using. You also have the option to select from a range of top search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, etc.

Keyword Analyser Tool
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis

Index	Previous Page (14)	Next Page (16)