Search engine marketing relies heavily on articles to promote products. Without a proper keyword optimized article, it is going to be difficult to get your article up in the search engine results. As if it has become a byword, unique quality content is important to please both search engines and humans. But whereas humans can understand what you’re trying to say most of the time, search engines cannot, or they would be solving captcha puzzles by now.
The way search engines understand articles is vastly different from us humans. You might take a sentence like this :
“The sound of silence was so oppressive, a pin dropping down would have been like thunder magnified several fold. In the depths of the room, nothing moved.”
I just made that up… We know that sounds like a silent room, but to a search engine, it means nothing. Basically, a search engine is only concerned about keywords.
Search engines count the number of times a keyword appears in an article to determine what it is about. So if your article is about scrabble, then of course the word scrabble should appear in your article more times than any other word there. The number of times a word appears in your article is called keyword density.
Example
A scrabble article with 300 words that mentions “scrabble” 3 times in the article has a keyword density of 1%.
Where should you place your keywords?
The best places should be:
- Header/title
- First paragraph
- Last paragraph
Also sprinke a few keywords somewhere in between the first and last paragraph. Try aiming for a keyword density of about 2 percent or slightly less and you should be okay.
I must remind you – do not pepper your article with keywords until it has a high keyword density, as not only it doesn’t work, it will actually downgrade your article with the big search engines. Always strive to keep it as natural as you can. A keyword density of 1-2 percent is good enough.
Recent improvements to search engine understanding of keywords in a technology called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has been adopted by Google, making it ever harder to fake your articles. So write your articles with the search engines in mind, but remember to keep them real always. Natural to both humans and search engines.
Many a time, it’s the simplest methods that work the best.