Keyword Density

Let's say you owned a pet store in Toronto.  You have created a website and you want to add content that will help drive traffic to your site.  How do you do it?

First rule is that content truly is King (or Queen in our case).  As a business owner you would want to create articles that are of interest to your target market and customers.  On the advise of your SEO staff you would be seeking articles that are top quality in terms of structure and content, free of spelling and gramatical errors.  They would have to be more than 300 words in length (Google only recognizes or "crawls" content that is 300 words or more).  And they would need to be keyword dense in your topic areas.

A keyword is the filter by which people find relevant content online.  If I was looking for a pet store in Toronto, I might use the following search strings:

"Petstore" +Toronto
"Pets" "Toronto" "Dog Food"
"Fish food in Toronto"

You get the drift.  Those are all keywords that the average person might enter into Google to find that particular business.  The client may ask us for twenty (20) articles that have the following keywords:

  • Petstore
  • Animal Care
  • Pets
  • Toronto Pet Supplies
  • Buying dog food in Toronto
Those keywords (which are researched for efficiency by the SEO professional) can be individual keywords or longer phrases that must then be added to the article in a natural flowing way.  The longer the keyword phrase the more difficult it is to add it to the content without having it stand out.  It may make your article seem less journalistic and more "choppy".  That is typical of SEO content articles and to be expected. 

Key words must be used verbatim.  For instance, if the phrase to be used is: "Toronto pet supplies" you could not replace it with "toronto pet supply". The keyword must be exactly as specified.

The client will also indicate the keyword density which is a calculation based on the total word count of the article and the number of instances that the keyword or phrase appears in the article. 

Examples: 

Client requests keyword density of 1.5 to 2%

Article Length: 511 words
Keywords: 8
Keyword Density: 8/511 = 0.0156 = 1.6% density

The procedure to identify your keywords is to manually count them in Microsoft Word:

a) CTRL-F (find)
b) Type keyword into the FIND field
c) Check off "Highlight all items found in: Main Document"
d) Click "Find All"

This will automatically highlight your keywords for you making it easy to count them.  If multiple key words are provided to you divide the number of keywords evenly.  For instance 4 x "Pets" and 4 x "Petstore" if both words were requested as keywords for the content.

What this does is allow for the article you have written to be loaded with search words that will make the article (and the website that it is posted on) come up faster in Google search under the specific criteria.

My suggestion is to write a general article on the topic matter and add in your key words at the end.  As a personal preference I find that this works best for me in the final edit stage.  Simply proof read your work and add in the appropriate keywords, spell and grammar check, ensure that the article is 500 words or more (not including the title), check keyword density and complete.
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