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.