Well, in my profession/position, I’m responsible for the Search Engine Optimization for our company’s web presence. Everybody seems to have a position on whats important to boost your ranking in the various search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc). I’m here to tell you, it’s not so simple. There’s a number of factors that play a role beyond the factors that Search Engines started using back in the early 2000/late 1990s.

Most of us have heard some of the terminology, “Search Engine Marketing,” “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization,” “Organic Search Results,” etc. It’s a huge industry with vast resources. It spans other industries as everyone wants to be found. It can be very expensive to pay for top placement, so how do you get there without going broke doing it?

There’s no single, simple answer. Most solutions require you to constantly adjust your content to fit the organizations desired goals. Some search engine marketing companies will advise you to pay for a maintenance plan (if you have the budget or don’t have the time to keep up with it yourself, this is a very valid option) which typically includes them reviewing your site periodically and updating content to keep you well ranked. Usually, a regular report is provided to the client to indicate progress.

Well, as vast as search engine optimization and search engine marketing can be, we can’t cover it all today. Perhaps, I’ll write a series of articles to help those of you that are technically savvy or time committed enough to make the changes needed. Today, I plan to cover Keyword Density.

Keyword Density, what does it mean? Why is it important? How can it drive better traffic? How can it help me to increase revenue? Wow, that’s quite a bit to answer, but we should be able to cover the basics in the next 5-10 minutes.

First, as wikipedia defines it,
“Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.”
To rank highly in organic search results (search results that are not paid for, but are based solely on content), one of the key factors is high keyword density. This means if you are writing an article on Keyword Density and there are 100 words in the article, the fact that the phrase, “keyword density” appears 10 times, your keyword density would be 10% (10/100).

Keyword density needs to be a thought in more than just the paragraph text. It should also be prominent within headers (h1, h2, h3, h4) title tags, URLs, etc. Each of these components has it’s own keyword density measurement.

Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc use these measurements to help them determine which content is most relevant to the topic being searched. If you have relevant content and your keyword density is high, you have a better chance to appear near the top of the rankings (keep in mind other factors also play a role, such as your popularity with other sites). They also measure content to make sure that there is sufficient additional content relevant to the keyword. If you use “Keyword Density” in 90 of 100 words, the content would most likely not be relevant or helpful to the end-user, so those results are typically omitted by the search engines.

If you tailor your traffic to keywords that your potential consumers will use, you have a better likelihood of being found by these potential buyers. Overall, the quality of traffic to your website should improve. This increased quality doesn’t necessarily mean more visitors, but it should directly lead to more conversions. We typically see a lower bounce rate (consumers that find your page and leave your site from the same page) as these leads are of a higher quality.

As you can see, the higher keyword density in fact leads to more revenue by increasing the quality of visitors on the site, leading to more conversions. Hopefully, this article provides a glimpse into the mysterious world of Search Engine Optimization. I look forward to following up with further editions soon.

If you have questions about this article or would like additional information, please leave a comment so that others can learn as well. If you found this article helpful, please visit our sponsor ads below as they help to cover the cost of hosting and development.

So I recently switched linux distros on my web server that hosts this wordpress blog. I tar’d up my wordpress files and dumped a database backup as well. I copied those files to my local machine and then performed the re-install. After the install, I imported the wordpress database, transferred back the wordpress files and all seemed to work well.

I noticed a day later that my wordpress permalinks were broken. All of the pages were displaying a 404 error. I confirmed that I had the apache mod_rewrite enabled and that the .htacess file was being re-written. I switched back to the default permalinks (?p=145) and the site worked as expected. For search engine optimization, however, I needed to figure out the custom wordpress permalinks issue. I tried a few wordpress plugins to resolve the missing permalinks with no solution to be found.