Wednesday 17 August 2011

Some Important SEO Terms: Keyword Density, Stuffing and Proximity

Some Important SEO Terms: Keyword Density, Stuffing and Proximity

By Deephak G Lal


There are multiple factors involved in determining the ranking of a website and there are different strategies that can be used to make these factors work for you. One such factor involved in SEO is Keywords. In the previous article "Keywords at a Glance" we had a general discussion about this on-site concept of SEO. In this article we shall discuss some important terms involved with optimization - Keyword Density, Stuffing and Proximity.
Keyword density:
It's a combination of the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appear on a web page or an article in quantity with other words. The more times the keyword appears the greater the overall density, for example, if you have an article that has 500 words of text and your keyword appears 5 times in that article (this is for a single word and not a phrase), then the keyword density is 1 percent. The belief is that the right amount of keyword density can improve the search engine ranking naturally; this is the main purpose of utilizing this technique. Keyword density can also apply to blogs or website content.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others will presume that the words or phrases mentioned must be relevant to the user search and important to send the users to the content. With that said, you need to be careful about something called keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing:
Over use of key terms is called keyword stuffing. Stuffing is basically using keywords or key phrases for the sole purpose of just grabbing major search engine's attention without actually providing any useful information to the visitor. It becomes difficult for the visitor to read the article because it's just filled with repetitive keywords. The best strategy is to use the key terms just a handful of times.
What is the right density? No one knows the exact answer to this question. Each SEO expert has his own theory on the right keyword density, some say that it should be between 2 to 6 percent and other suggest differently.
Another important point to remember is to make sure that your article makes sense when read aloud. Don't use your keyword too much that it becomes harmful to your site's marketing campaign. The trick is to strike the right balance between pleasing the major search engines and providing valuable content to the readers. This is a tricky concept, very low keyword density, your website rank suffers; and too much density, again your website rank suffers.
Keyword Proximity:
The proximity between the keywords or key phrases is also important. The closer the key terms or phrases are with each other, the better is the chance of achieving a higher rank. Consider the given sentences:
� The Harry Potter Series has cast its spell on both children as well as on adults.

� Very few series have had an equal following among both children and adults as that of Harry Potter.
Let's assume that the above mentioned texts are part or two different pages, if anyone searches for the term "Harry Potter series" the page with the first sentence will be ranked higher than that with the second sentence. This is because the keywords are placed nearer in the first sentence.

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