The Official Google Blog recently announced that you can now see "local" news results within Google News for queries for your city name or zip code. The news will be presented from local news sources. The goal that the Google team had been working towards was to not have local news limited, similar to the multiple sources that are displayed for regular Google news sources. The idea is to provide many angles on the same story but with local news you can imagine how that can be limiting. They feel that they have found a good balance with their local news. They claim that,

they can create a local section for any city, state, or country in the world and include thousands of sources still!

They analyze each word of each story for the location of the news AND the location of the source. Pretty ingenious. They are saying that it is still an experiment, but then again Gmail is still in Beta!

There seems to be people that are arguing that keyword density is not part of the ranking algorithm, or at least not a relevant part. I would argue against this because if you spam you pages with your keywords you will get penalized. That alone goes to show you that Google DOES in fact look at keyword density.

It is argued that if keyword density was important then searches for words like "the" or "time" that are commonly used in the english language would result in very spammy SERPS. There is a good argument against this idea that states, Google uses keyword density more heavily for keyword phrases rather than just one word terms. Either way you slice it keyword density IS a piece of the ranking puzzle. It is not THE magical piece of the puzzle that some people claim and I think that at the end of the day this was the idea behind the post at SEP. Because many self proclaimed SEO pros will tout keyword density and competitive analysis of keyword density is the bees knees. But a real professional SEO consultant will tell you that keyword density is but one small piece of puzzle that is organic SEO.

If you are not aware of keyword density, this is the percentage of times you mention any given keyword or keyword phrase within a given amount of content. So it is the density of your keyword(s) in your content. This can be measured numerous ways (no pun intended), you can count the content by characters with or without spaces, or you can count your content by the number of words, etc. I prefer to use the word count as my yardstick. Let's say you have 100 words, if you mention your keyword target 5 times then you have a 5% keyword density. If your keyword density is too high then the search engines could consider your content too spammy, not a high enough density could get you no where in the rankings (Yahoo and MSN tend to like a higher density of keywords making them a bit easier to game). The important thing to note is that you must stay consistent with the way that you measure keyword density. There are many free keyword density measuring tools out there, so find one you like, experiment with it to find the sweet spot in your keyword density, and then stick with it!

Now I mentioned title tags in the title of this post so here we go. I see so many sites with too many keywords in their title tag. People do not understand that there is such a thing as title tag keyword density. If you use too many keywords in the title tag you dilute the strength of any one keyword. And, if you use too many keywords in the title tag you can come off looking spammy to Google. Any decent Internet marketing company would know this and advise you so. Many professional SEO consultants differ on the amount of keywords and the title tag keyword density, but I will tell you that keeping it safe (low) is the way to go, make it as natural looking as possible. Measuring the keyword densities of the top ranking sites for your keyword targets is a good place to start, then test and tweak until you get the optimal results. This is the foundation of content optimization. If you write the proper content this can be enough to rank your site alone!

I prefer to use this format for the title tag: Keyword | Variation of Keyword OR Keyword | Variation of Keyword | Company Name. FYI, there also such things as meta description keyword density, meta keywords keyword density, alt tag keyword density, page content keyword density, overall page keyword density, and code keyword density. Can you think of any more?

Many designers do not pay any or way to little attention to the comment sections. Something that is really foolish if the site want users to interact with the content and leave their comments.

Here is a few guidelines to think about when doing the comment section of a page:
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I am a little teared on this subject. One part of me would like to see standardization of punctuation as a part of the globalization. Another part of me however, wants to keep old traditions. The standards are not necessary good once either!
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