Keyword Density and Title Tags

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?