You probably know how essential keywords are to your website traffic. Keywords help search engines crawl your website and rank it highly, letting your website appear on the first page for search queries related to your website content. Considering this, it only sounds logical to stuff your content with as many keywords as possible.
However, this goes against SEO best practices and may lead to your website being punished and ranking lower. This might sound counterintuitive, but there is a method to the madness. In this article, we help you understand the intricacies of keywords and how to avoid ending up on the second page or, worse, being removed from the search engine’s index.
Understanding Keywords: What Are They?
There is little to take away from the literal meaning behind the word “keyword.” It might be misleading to some. As the name suggests, a keyword is essential to website content. However, keywords can sometimes be “key phrases.” By definition, a keyword is a word or phrase that defines the topic of your content.
In other words, a keyword is a word or phrase that users would use to find information in your content. For example, the keyword that might have brought you to this article would be “How many keywords should I use for SEO?”
How Many Keywords Should You Use in SEO?
When it comes to search engine optimization with keywords, how many are too many? There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to how many keywords should be in any content. As a general rule of thumb, it is largely accepted that SEO keyword density should amount to between 1-2 percent of the total content word count. This translates to around five keywords for every 500 words.
However, it is essential to remember that content quality trumps keyword density. Search engines prioritize the human experience, so keyword stuffing should be avoided.
For highly technical articles, it may be impossible to try to avoid heavy keyword usage throughout the length of your content. This is because they may often be descriptive or integral in conveying the critical intent of your chosen topic.
In such cases, as a marketer or website owner, you should focus on writing high-quality and engaging content that effectively answers the user’s search query. This will indicate to search engines that your content is relevant and consequently avoid hurting your ranking and visibility.
How Many Keywords for SEO Count as Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is a practice that manipulates search engines into ranking content highly simply because it is chock-full of keywords. This black hat technique could lead to your website being punished.
You might have encountered content that barely sounds logical while attempting to find an answer to your search query. “Are you looking for a home in NY that is more than a house in NY? Then this home in NY is just what you need.” The previous statements target the keyword “home in NY,” but they make no sense to the reader and are an excellent example of keyword stuffing.
Consequently, keyword stuffing is less of a numbers game and more of a technique that prioritizes keywords over the user experience. The consequences of keyword stuffing are explored further in this article.
Keyword Diversity: Exact Match vs. Variations
Keywords funnel users to your website through search engine rankings. However, several keywords exist depending on their relationship to the search query. Exact match keywords match the search query verbatim. Exact match keywords appeal to search engines by signaling high relevance for a specific search query.
One downside of exact-match keywords is that the user’s search query must match your keyword’s meaning, translating to a narrow reach (the very high relevance may offset this).
On the other hand, variation keywords may retain the SEO keyword’s meaning with slight changes in article usage, contain similar phrases, or be closely related to the keyword. Variation keywords have the advantage of having a broader reach with a slight compromise on relevance.
Exact-match and variation keywords have their shortcomings. Pairing both keyword types ensures your website content ranks highly without over-optimizing, which may contribute to keyword stuffing. Additionally, your content reads naturally, which helps with SEO and prevents your content from sounding generic, which may be off-putting to users.
Keyword Semantics vs. Keyword Synonyms
As you might have noticed, an SEO strategy is the safest way to ensure you stay on the right side of search engine rankings. Understanding the differences between keyword semantics and synonyms is crucial to drafting a winning strategy. So, what is the difference between the two?
Keyword Semantics
Keyword semantics are variations of the keyword that meet the user’s search query. Taking this article as an example, the keyword “how many words for SEO” can be replaced with keyword semantics such as “keyword density,” “keyword optimization,” or “keyword count.” In simple terms, keyword semantics target the same idea with different languages.
Google and other search engines have extremely advanced algorithms that can identify keyword synonyms and semantics with pinpoint accuracy. These algorithms allow you to create high-ranking content for your website without risking keyword stuffing.
Keyword synonyms are SEO keywords with the same or nearly the same meaning as the search query or the target keyword. For this article, the keyword synonym of “SEO keywords” could be “SEO terms.” Keyword synonyms allow you to diversify your content and rank for multiple search queries without overusing a single keyword.
Why Over-Optimizing Can Lead to Penalties
Search engines crawl websites to determine their relevance to users when answering a search query. Consequently, they tend to prioritize user-friendly content while punishing any attempts at keyword stuffing. Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to determine keyword density and can pick out keyword stuffing by referencing keyword usage with other high-ranking content.
Additionally, keyword stuffing tends to increase a website’s bounce rate and engagement, indicators that are picked up by search engines for low-quality content. Ultimately, this causes the search engines to reduce your website’s ranking by reducing your visibility, which dents traffic directed toward the website.
Best Practices for Keyword Use
What should be at the forefront of your SEO strategy? Creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content is the best way to ensure your website enjoys high SEO keyword ranking. Below is a brief illustration of some of the most important SEO practices to guarantee your website remains on the first page for your target keyword.
Stick to Relevance
When in doubt, stick to relevance. Highly technical topics are bound to be riddled with keywords. This might trigger alarm bells of keyword stuffing. However, as earlier mentioned, you will not be penalized for providing high-quality, engaging, and relevant content. The interplay between keyword semantics, synonyms, variations, and long-tail keywords guarantees that high-quality content will rank highly.
Optimize for Long-Tail Keyword
Long-tail keywords are longer versions of the target keyword that have the same meaning and target the same search query. The advantage of long-tail keywords over their exact-match counterparts is that they tend to be more specific and often less competitive, positively impacting your conversion rate.
Monitor Keyword Density
Whenever the question “How many keywords should I use for SEO?” pops up, the phrase “keyword stuffing” is never far behind. To avoid low rankings on search engines and removal from search indexes, among other penalties, you should routinely monitor SEO keyword density to ensure your content doesn’t exceed recommended numbers. Remembering that SEO word count should be conducted per page and not for the entire website is crucial.
Wrapping Up
The exact number of keywords you should use for SEO without being penalized by Google and other search engines depends on a case-by-case basis but should be limited to roughly one to two percent of the total word count. However, marketers and website owners should prioritize high-quality, relevant, and engaging content to ensure their content adequately addresses the topic of their target keyword.
We provide tailored keyword research, content planning, and optimized content that helps your website rank and convert.
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These can often pose quite a challenge to writers.
It’s not the keywords themselves. Those tend to be pretty straightforward.
It’s the often odd combinations of words in ways that are anything but grammatically correct.
Add to that a general lack of punctuation, throw in the name of a city and state, and you have what seems like a recipe for the most awkward sentences ever written!
So, how do we creatively insert a keyword in our content for best results?
Let’s explore.
The Content Marketer’s Café with Julia McCoy, Episode 3: How to Use Long-Tail Keywords Naturally In Your Content for SEO Success
Competition Comparison: Long-Tail Keywords vs. Broad Keywords
I’ve been able to rank content just on my site, expresswriters.com, for over 11,000 phrases.
Do you know what the majority of those keyword phrases are?
Long-tail phrases.
So when you’re looking for keywords to optimize your content with, you can either look up broad or long tail keywords.
Broad Keywords
1-2 words long
Also known as: “short tail”, “head terms”
Long Tail Keywords
3-5 words
Long tail keywords are primarily better because of two factors:
Lower competition: Easier to rank for. Great opportunities for new, emerging or growing sites.
Higher buying intent (ROI): Searchers are usually looking a specific answer to their question and are much more likely to be in the buying stage. Example: “where to buy basketball shoes online” vs. “shoes” – the searcher knows exactly what he wants by searching the long tail keyword, and he/she is much more ready to buy!
Broad keywords are tempting because of the amount of traffic searching for them.
But remember, you need the right traffic, not a ton of traffic, when it comes to looking at the value of keywords that will bring in real results.
Which type of customer would sell today if they walked in your dress shop?
Someone who wants a “dress”
Someone who wants a black dress, size M, for an evening party next week
One of my favorite tools to research keywords with is SEMrush and Mangools KWFinder.
In KWfinder, here’s what it looks like to find a low competition long-tail keyword.
For example, we looked up a keyword, blogging statistics. We wrote a blog around this as a keyword since it had a “possible rating at 50/100” – that’s since gone up to 52 – and we were able to get our blog in the top 4 results for that keyword. The left side of KWFinder is where you’ll find your gold mines – long tail keyword opportunities that you can write content pieces around.
I recommend going long-form and writing one piece of content around one keyword for best results. Don’t dilute and cram too many keywords in one piece.
Natural Language in SEO
The days of keyword-stuffing your way to the first page of Google are looooong gone, but today with how smart Google is, there’s no reason you can’t do this:
[bctt tweet=”Write for search engines without sounding like you’re writing for search engines, says @JuliaEMcCoy. ?” username=”ExpWriters”]
When it comes to writing with SEO in mind, this means using natural language – and natural variations of the words that appear in the focus and secondary keywords – instead of inserting the same exact keywords and key phrases into your text over and over again.
Let’s Talk About… Focus Keywords + Natural Usage
We always ask our clients for one focus keyword per piece.
But when it comes to penning the actual copy, if the exact keyword phrase doesn’t flow well, we fall back on just writing naturally.
Here’s an example.
For instance, this client-supplied keyword phrase:
“best ux designer Austin”
Clearly won’t work in either the title tag, meta description, or in the content (page, article, blog post, etc.). It may be an important, valuable keyword phrase for the client, but it’s a bit too clunky to use as is.
Even if you think you can squeeze that kind of phrase into a sentence – such as “When it comes to finding the best UX designer, Austin has a lot of choices to offer.” Sure, once in a while you’ll be able to get away with that. But far too often, the inclination seems to be to get hung up on that exact keyword phrase.
In a title tag or headline, the best approach would be to use the keyword naturally, like so:
“How to Find the Best Web and UX Designer in Austin”
You would then use variations on this keyword phrase throughout your content.
Bottom line:
Don’t try to force the keyword into the copy, and don’t then use the exact same keyword or key phrase over and over. Use synonymous keywords.
Location-Based Keywords
Let’s talk briefly about location-based keywords.
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, along comes a location-based keyword:
“eyedoctor in Burlington Vermont”
Remember:
To Google, there is absolutely no difference between:
“eyedoctor in Burlington VT” and “eye doctor in Burlington, VT”
Since we’re humans writing for humans – we should always defer to using proper punctuation, grammar, and style, even in SEO writing.
So, use the space between eye and doctor.
When you take into account that these keyword lists being supplied to (or, in some cases, created by) us are almost always generated by such tools as Google’s keyword tool and other tools – not actual humans – it’s not surprising the keywords provided to us don’t include punctuation, proper grammar, etc.: because they were generated by algorithms/tools.
It’s absolutely essential for websites to use location keywords in the page titles and Meta description tags of their pages. When it comes to using those same location keywords in the content itself – in the copy, in headings, and in image Alt tags – remember to avoid overuse.
Ways to Get Creative with Location-Based Keywords
Let’s say your keyword is “gluten free pasta Phoenix.”
You don’t have to jam that keyword all over your web page, article, blog post, etc. – including in the meta data for those pages.
You can break it up any number of ways: pasta, Phoenix, gluten free, gluten, gluten free pasta, gluten free in Phoenix, pasta in Phoenix. That’s a lot of variation out of one phrase!
It is, however, still important to use your focus keyword or phrase in the first and last paragraphs, at least one <H2> heading, and the title of the article, if at all possible.
But as we’ve already discussed, make sure you’re using those keywords naturally.
Ultimately, it’s about balance: be creative, use real sentences and headings, speak naturally, and don’t overdo it.
How to Tell if You’re Overdoing It with a Keyword
It may sound silly, but it really works: simply read your content out loud and pay attention to how it feels reading the content, and listen for any awkwardness, clunky-sounding sentences or phrases, general weirdness.
You should be able to hear where your writing doesn’t feel natural – it won’t easily roll off the tip of your tongue.
You’ll also hear where you use a specific word too many times.
And a nice side benefit to reading it aloud – even if you’re doing it silently – is you’ll almost always find places that could benefit from a bit of finesse and polish.
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For many years, “keyword density” was the holy grail of SEO content.
There have been dozens, if not hundreds of theories on what the optimal keyword density is, from formulas produced to strict guidelines on how writers should be using it in SEO content daily.
No one knows better than me. I came from the old Google days (pre-2012) when online writers were sometimes treated as the minions of SEO black hats. It was rough: we had to stuff in those keywords like nobody’s business, no matter how much they read awkwardly.
According to many industry experts, however, keyword density has now completely died today.
Is that true? Let’s chat about it.
What Really is Keyword Density?
Keyword density is the measurement that indicates how many times a keyword appears in a piece of content (i.e. blog, web page) versus the total number of words in the piece. Keywords were counted within content, headings, meta descriptions, image names and alt tags to provide what many experts believed for many years was a better user experience.
Keyword density was calculated by the number of times a specific keyword was included in content, divided by the total number of words in an analyzed text, x one hundred. For example: 10 keywords in 500 words = 2% keyword density.
Here’s an official chart showing the formula:
Photo courtesy sycosure.com
This formula, while it may seem meaningless today, was very popular in and around 2011 and was widely believed to be the “right” way to do SEO content.
As I mentioned earlier, I remember the days of stuffing my SEO content with keywords and counting said density, and it was rough. Marketers in 2011 thought creating 50 articles on this exact keyword “payday loan Atlanta Georgia” was a good idea, and those keywords stuffed in made the content like the most overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey you ever saw.
Now as you and any good content marketer knows, today’s content is more about peoplethan keywords.
And that’s the real reason we don’t count our keywords any more.
Let’s explore further why keyword density is officially dead.
The Keyword Density Booby Trap
According to Moz, companies that focus too much on attaining a certain keyword density often run the risk of ruining content, slaughtering credibility, annoying readers, and earning themselves all too many “back” clicks. Strong words, right?
Unfortunately, Moz is right. It stands to reason that keyword density may be one of the great SEO myths of our day. While keyword density is meant to create a more readable document, more often than not it simply destroys the legibility and readability of content, creating low conversion rates and poor user experience.
Why, then, have we been taught that keyword density is the end-all-be-all of SEO and high-quality content? For one, many people were taught to believe that keyword density is how search engines determine the relevance of a given page.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Moz, if search engines focused solely on keyword density to rank pages, all content creators would need to do is repeat the keyword phrase of choice over and over again in order to rank well in Google. And, trust us, Google is not that stupid.
In fact, it’s likely that Google evolved beyond that in the late 90’s. That said, it’s unwise to use density as a reliable metric in today’s search climate. Most reputable keyword tools have already kicked it to the curb. In order to rank pages, Google does take keywords into account but the actual density doesn’t matter nearly as much as we’ve always believed it does.
The Pitfalls of Keyword Density
When you really think about it, keyword density is a fluid term. To have a certain number of keywords in a piece of content is one thing, but to attain the correct relative position and dispersion of keywords throughout the document is entirely another.
The traditional measure of keyword density fails to take into account things like how many documents are relevant for a given keyword or how the piece of content targeting the keyword uses things like internal linking, webpage structure, user experience (including how long users interact with a page and what the page’s bounce rate is), domain age, and back links.
Yes: Keyword Density is Now Confirmed as a Useless Metric
Because of this, keyword density is essentially a useless metric which many industry leaders believe is a complete waste of time. According to Moz, “people who chase some mystical on-page keyword density are probably doing more harm than good.”
This update allowed Google to process search results based on semantic search, which evaluates results based on their ability to match user intent, rather than ranking them by keyword density and other Boolean measurements.
As soon as Hummingbird came out, marketers began to re-evaluate their relationships with keyword density. Specifically, many marketers began wondering if keyword density mattered as much as they had always thought it did. Overwhelmingly, the answer was “no.”
Before semantic search, Google used metrics like keywords and linking architecture to determine which pages were the best match to a reader’s intent and query. Once the search engine had evaluated these things, it returned rank-ordered results that were based largely upon how well the page’s keywords matched to the number of links within the site as a whole. More keywords, more positive evaluation, generally.
This led to the rise of keyword density and to many marketers beginning to see keyword density as one of the best ways to rank well in Google. This, in turn, led not only to a craze with keyword density but also to black-hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and predatory linking strategies.
Semantic Search De-Values the Keyword “Overstuffing” Density
Fortunately, the introduction of Hummingbird altered the playing field in a big way. One of the main things Hummingbird did was use semantic search principals to make keyword stuffing and misleading linking strategies too difficult and expensive to pursue.
Because Hummingbird evaluates content based on its relevance and value to a reader, it actually looks at contextual relevancy (the words around your keywords) more than it does your keywords themselves. This allows the search engine to determine which pages best match user intent and are most likely to be relevant to a reader.
Because Hummingbird understands that the correlation between themes, videos, and topics is more important than the number of times a given keyword appears in a piece of content, it ranks pages that place an increased focus on context higher than it does pages that focus mainly on keywords. Because of this, many marketers have been proclaiming the death of keyword density for years.
5 Post-Hummingbird Keyword Truths
Now that we’ve discussed semantic search, it’s important to think about what exactly, keywords are doing in today’s society.
So, here are the five golden truths of today’s modern keyword rules:
1. Keywords are tools to discover a user’s intent
Just because keyword density doesn’t truly matter any longer, keywords are still important. Instead of being measured against a meaningless metric, however, they’re now used to determine what a user is looking for. This means that all the words in a query are important but that the connection between them is now the focus.
2. Keyword density is dead
We can talk about it openly now – keyword density truly is dead. Content that is created with the goal of satisfying a set keyword density number generally isn’t catering to user needs and we know that, in 2016 and beyond, value, relevance, and interest are the most important metrics search engines are using to evaluate content.
3. Keyword research isn’t as important as user intent
Knowing which keywords will rank well is one thing but knowing what the intent behind those keywords is is entirely another. As search engine algorithms continue to get smarter, it’s imperative that marketers learn to focus on providing content that caters to a user’s intent rather than a set of obscure (and outdated) ranking algorithms.
4. Use natural synonyms
Now more than ever, readers are happy to leave if your content feels spammy or forced. This means that instead of stuffing your content with keywords, you need to employ natural synonyms in a comfortable way. This makes your content feel varied, unique, and interesting.
5. Focus on quality over anything else
SEO is a little bit like fashion: there’s always a new trend on the horizon. When you buck the trends, though, and focus instead on providing lasting, valuable content that fits your reader’s needs, you can begin to create more sustainable content that helps meet your user’s needs.
A Better Way: 3 Modern Keyword Tips
If keyword density is dead (and it is), what remains? Ideally, writing content boils down to using a natural language pattern that revolves around keywords, nouns, verbs, and synonyms. This is where a page gets its true meaning and value
In this type of construct, keywords are not nearly as important as the words that surround them. For example, “Apple” could refer to the tasty, crispy fruit or the world-famous tech company. With that in mind, there are a few ways to proceed into the post-keyword age. Here’s what we recommend:
1. Use keywords in the headline
Your on-page content is very important. With that in mind, it’s important to learn how to use keywords correctly in your headline. This is not because SEO requires you to master flawless keyword placement or to use your keywords in your H1 and H2 tags. In fact, many experts say that it truly doesn’t matter if you use keywords in you H1 and H2. Rather, the reason this is so important, is that people click on your page expecting to wind up on a page featuring the same headline as the one they clicked in the SERPs. If this doesn’t happen, they’ll happily click the “back” button in order to find a page that they believe more closely matches their queries.
This is called “pogo-sticking” and it’s a real problem in SEO. When people navigate from SERPs to a page, back to the SERPs several times, the search engine gets the distinct message that people aren’t happy with the provided search results. This causes the search engine to down-rank a set page or assume that its relevance and value aren’t up to par. Fortunately, this isn’t fixed by stuffing more keywords into your text, but rather by using them correctly in order to create a relevant, valuable page that your readers appreciate.
2. Choose user experience over keyword density
If you have a choice between using your keyword phrase a set number of times or providing a great user experience, you should always, always choose the latter. This is especially important in light of Google’s recent Hummingbird update, which allowed the search engine to become incredibly sophisticated about how it evaluates text and the relevance and contextual value of it.
In light of updates like these, it’s no longer web pages with the “correct” level of keyword relevance that are winning the race, but pages that offer the best and most sophisticated content that most closely matches the intent and desires of the searcher. In light of this, it’s more important to connect the concepts and vocabulary that a search engine associates with a certain concept and to use those things to make your content strong, valuable, and interesting.
3. Provide unique content
This is the battle cry for content creators everywhere: in order to be valuable, your content needs to be unique, but what is unique content really? To put it simply, unique content is content that provides helpful information to users packaged in a neat and exciting little package. To be clear, this means more than just providing content that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web: it also means providing content that offers a unique information and value that a reader can’t find anywhere else. This, in turn, involves using keywords in a unique and specific way that allows them to enhance rather than downgrade your text.
Conclusion
Keyword density is dead, and we might as well mourn it now. Fortunately, the passing of this useless metric frees us up to focus on more important things, like providing an outstanding user experience and writing content that caters to our users, rather than to some useless ranking metric that nobody truly cares about, anyway.
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