Let’s go to the heart of every successful website, namely, keywords. Where they’re placed and how they’re highlighted will give you a decided competitive advantage.
SEOs will argue that keywords in the anchor text will trump on-page keyword repetition, but I’ve seen the ugliest sites rank for their primary keywords when they inadvertently repeated their company name, brand name and/or product several times.
Webmasters generally don’t link to “ugly” sites. So attracting incoming links to a less than appealing site may be an exercise in futility for new websites, especially.
How to Increase Your Keyword Density
There’s no magic formula for the number of times you should use a keyword on your page. However, it is very true that increasing the number of times that keyword (or its derivative or variation) appears will often increase your page’s rankings.
Don’t get carried away. Adding a keyword phrase hundreds of times to a page will get you penalized. But, if your keyword phrase currently appears on your page five or six times, and you work that phrase into your page an additional three or four times, you’ll almost always see an improvement in your search rank.
This is particularly true if you place keywords in locations search engines deem important, such as
- Keywords in headings
- Keywords in bullet lists
- Italicize or bold primary keywords
- Use keywords in the anchor text to link to relevant sub-pages
Highlighting content in this way allows search engines to “understand” that they are important to you and, ultimately, to your visitor.
The rule of thumb is to write Web copy for your visitor first; then go back and sprinkle in keywords. When you read your copy out loud, you’ll hear if you’ve overdone it.
As long as the keywords are worked in so that it makes sense to your reader, be creative.
The Key to Keyword Density
Like Title tags, keyword density is a continual process of tweaking. Remember, there’s no perfect keyword density to ensure high rankings, and its no longer accurate to say, “This search engine prefers 4% keyword density and anything over 12% will get you penalized.”
Instead, just add your keywords to your copy a few more times and see what happens. Most of the time (especially with Bing/Yahoo!), you’ll see your page rank improve within a few days. At a certain point you’ll see diminishing or even negative returns, so closely monitor the effects your changes are having.
KeywordDensity, one of my favorite tools, gives you a behind the scenes peak at your competitors keyword content. You can view what keywords you need to emphasize to equal or outrank your competition. Just do what they’re doing, only better.
Checking Google’s Cache for Competitive Advantage
Another tactic I use to see how Google views a competitor’s Web page is to view the cache (or snapshot) of how the search engine robot “sees” the page.
To do this, type in to the Google search box any keyword phrase for which you’re trying to rank. In the search engine results page (SERPs) you will see the “cache” next to the company URL. Click the cache link, and Google will highlight everywhere on the page that it finds that keyword.
If you find that a competitor has few keywords in the body copy and the site is still outranking you, then you can assume they are outperforming you in the incoming link arena. I then recommend performing back link analysis, but alas, that is the subject of another article.
