SEO Tycoon

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 07:25 AM

Hi all, just having a look at some competitions site and their keyword density which lead me to an interesting question.
When counting the number of words in a page to try and work out the keyword density - i take it that words lie 'a' 'and' 'at' 'if' ect are counted as a single word?
Daft question I know but it would be interesting to get a confirmation on this. I know that SE will ignore certain words in searches and indexing - so i wondered if this may spill over when calculating KD?
Are there any other factors that you guys know of that may effect KD on these terms?
I would like to post the link to the site , but i dont want to give them more inbound links! if you want i can pm the url for you to see what i mean. Needless to say they have what appears to be a bit of an overkill on KD on the pages in question and these pages have clearly been made with SE's in mind

**chrishirst** · 12-14-2009, 08:30 AM

There is no such thing as "keyword" density

Well at least not since 1998 anyway.

Those days are long gone

**chrishirst** · 12-14-2009, 08:31 AM

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...d-density.html

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 08:45 AM

so all these books and articles i have been reading about KD are bull then - or at least outdated? But surley Google will give a better result for a page it considers to be relevant to the topic.
So in the case of the page that i was looking at where it repeated gas enginners about 15 times - whats your view on that. Or am i missing the point.

**chrishirst** · 12-14-2009, 09:16 AM

Just because the word/phrase is repeated many times it does NOT mean that is the reason for the page "ranking highly" and does not make a page "more relevant".

Much of the "prevailing wisdom" about SEO was devised and written when AltaVista was top dog. I'm just waiting for the "Do HTML comment help with SEO"? to crop up.

There are plenty of instances of pages "ranking" without the word/phrase even appearing on the page.

To get a page some promotion up the ranks, you need to get more factors right than the pages you are trying to leap over, not simply overdo one thing that might be a factor.
It may well be the case that overdoing something could become a negative factor. The so-called "over-optimising" which is of course a contradiction in terms.
Note the complete lack of the word "penalty" there.

Forget looking for "magical numbers" of this that and the other and create pages for real users, oddly enough the search engines "prefer" such pages as well.

**edgray** · 12-14-2009, 09:37 AM

Google is much more interested in Keyword Placement. Rather than calculating density, Google understands a page, or at least tries to, based on the markup you use in your page. This would be TITLE, H1-H6, DESCRIPTION.

These "semantic" markers, give Google a good indication of what your page is about.

This in itself will not guarantee any rankings of course, just that Google gets the gist of your page.

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 09:53 AM

Yeah thanks for that - im just evaluating competition for the moment seeing what they are upto and where they might be doing things i can improve on - its interesting on the KD though, as i want aware that it had ceased to be of use so to speak. You say it was abandoned in 1998 - is that on Googles guidelines somewhere? It pis$es me off actually that a lot of these books i read still have reference to it - you would think that certain revised editions would be more up-to-date.

**edgray** · 12-14-2009, 10:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shonkyboy

Yeah thanks for that - im just evaluating competition for the moment seeing what they are upto and where they might be doing things i can improve on - its interesting on the KD though, as i want aware that it had ceased to be of use so to speak. You say it was abandoned in 1998 - is that on Googles guidelines somewhere? It pis$es me off actually that a lot of these books i read still have reference to it - you would think that certain revised editions would be more up-to-date.

The thing is I don't think Google ever calculated Keyword Density. The big difference between Google and the other SEs at the time was the importance it gave to linking: the theory that Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with whilst at Stanford was that in a network of interlinked documents, the ones with the most inbound links would be the most authoritative documents.

The thing is, there are still many SEOs writing literature and pushing KD as an important factor. The only way you can be sure is to test it yourself.

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 10:15 AM

As the chamges to the site in question are pretty new - im going to check this in a few weeks to see how they rate for these pages. As for my site - there is a rewrite pending soon - so the bit of research im doing now will determine how the new site is going to be structureed. As the site grew organically over a period - the current on page SEO isnt very good at all - and hopefully this will change with the new version due out early in the new year.
Obviously im aware of all the off-page factors that need addressing - but i think it's important the developer gets the on-page element sorted first

.
It makes me wonder though - out of all the things i have read recently how much of this is actually outdated.
Is there any resource - or discussion thread you know of that might list these? if not it might be a good idea to start a thread and see what comes back.

**edgray** · 12-14-2009, 10:20 AM

The way I see it, On Page SEO is getting Google to understand your page. Getting decent backlinks is giving Google a good reason to rank you. So yes, it's important to make sure Google understands the content of your page properly.

Hmmm. There's been a lot of discussion about the important factors in SEO in this forum. Have a look back over the past few months and you'll find lots. I've written a beginners SEO guide, and excuse the self-promo here, and it might be a good place for you to start: SEO Guide

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 10:34 AM

many thanks for that ed - i am a fairly seasoned SEo'er and have been involved in web design for many years - so im very familiar with the basic stuff - as a bit o a saddo i tend to read a lot of articles / books/ mags with conflicting views - and this is what gets my goat sometimes.

I guess what i was saying is to get together a list of SEO myths and refennces to what these supposed 'experts' deem good modern practice and banish them to hades forever. Saying that, we all know that the SE's could shift their methods at any moment and old tricks might just work again. There was some speculation recently about the return in some sense of the keyword meta tag - as in that Google and co - were actually taking notice of it. How true this is I don't know - but you get the general idea

.

Ther was a case stufy where someone had experimented with it - ie a phrase that didnt appear on the page - just in the keywords meta tag.
And the phrase actually came up in a search.
It makes you wonder, that as many SEO'ers dropped the keyword tag a long time ago (personally i still use it in moderation just in case) that Google know this and have in some way included this in their indexing.
Sort of. I guess none of us will truly know unless we hanppen to get rich enough to buy Google out. Fat chance there then.

**FenceGuy** · 12-14-2009, 10:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by edgray

The way I see it, On Page SEO is getting Google to understand your page. Getting decent backlinks is giving Google a good reason to rank you. So yes, it's important to make sure Google understands the content of your page properly.

Hmmm. There's been a lot of discussion about the important factors in SEO in this forum. Have a look back over the past few months and you'll find lots. I've written a beginners SEO guide, and excuse the self-promo here, and it might be a good place for you to start: SEO Guide

I read the guide you linked to, on the title tag, I like to put the keyword (or product) first and then the name of my business after.... Not sure if it matters, but it seems that the first words in the title seem to have more weight (just my observations when analyzing my competition pages)

**shonkyboy** · 12-14-2009, 11:23 AM

hmm - this is precisley the sort of thing im on about - a few different books i have all give slight variations on this - some say - business first - KW later - others the other way round. I would have thought that keyword/phrase first - business later myself but again - this is the kind of thing up for debate.
Would you think it is even necessary to put the business name on every page anyway? Mind you as Google is ranking pages rather than sites - it wouldnt be able to tie a page up with the site unless the KW for the business name was in the URL or another Element - description tag etc...? Interesting one this....

**edgray** · 12-14-2009, 12:00 PM

From my own experiments, the order of the words in the TITLE tag has had little effect on sites positions for those keywords. However, it was over a year ago that I tested TITLE tags in any depth so perhaps they've changed that part of the algorithm. I have noticed recently more sites putting their company name last, but I would still doubt that would alter a position in the SERPs. These days it seems altering text effects it very little compared to links.

I would consider it important to put the company name on each page. Not so much for search engines, but for people using the sites. Remember, a lot of visitors to your sites will not land on the homepage, so it's good to give them a reminder who the page belongs to!

**francis84** · 12-14-2009, 01:09 PM

For me, keyword density is an SEO guide, not standard. No need to follow EXACTLY what was stated about it; like what they calld 3% keyword density.

**chrishirst** · 12-14-2009, 03:25 PM

Bob Gladstein (www.raisemyrank.com) has done some testing on the word count in the title element.

http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/

**rakulkk** · 12-15-2009, 06:05 AM

you can refer the below link, then you can get idea about keyword density
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_density

**shonkyboy** · 12-15-2009, 06:13 AM

on the topic of the business name in the title tags - I came across this today you might find interesting: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search...anking-factors no2 states that Keyowrd use as First Words of the tag is considered high importance.

**edgray** · 12-15-2009, 06:21 AM

thanks for the article. What's interesting about that is that 66% feel the keywords can go anywhere in the TITLE and 63% feel they need to be first.

Perhaps the question they should've been put as an either/or question, we could've got more of a definitive answer.

**chrishirst** · 12-15-2009, 06:25 AM

Aye! There are some wild theories come out of seomoz!