The keyword conundrum is one that plagues all bloggers. We’re supposed to use keywords, but you can’t use too many, or you’re stuffing. You can’t use them just once, or you’ll get beat by anyone who uses them properly.
Search has gotten more complicated, as more websites and blogs appear, and people are getting smarter about SEO and how they use keywords. This means that we as bloggers have to create smaller and smaller niches (which is a smart strategy to begin with).
Let’s say my hobby is old-school pens. Not just any pen, like the $.69 Bic, but old fountain pens. More specifically, refillable fountain pens — the kind where the ink comes in a little bottle, and you need to refill it with an eye dropper.
Ten or twelve years ago, I could have optimized a website to be found if you searched for “pens,” or maybe “fountain pens.” But now, as more people have pen websites, I need to be more specific and only talk about “refillable fountain pens.” I could even take it one step further, and write about “repairing refillable fountain pens.”
And therein lies the problem. If I want to win any search for “repairing refillable fountain pens,” I have to use that exact phrase over and over. It’s a clunky, 4-word phrase that defies elegant usage. I can use it a few times naturally, like in a headline — “5 trends in 2010 for repairing refillable fountain pens” or Ashton Kutcher’s celebrity secrets for repairing refillable fountain pens.” — but I’ll plumb the depths of that barrel pretty quickly. So I need to find an alternative.
The body text is also important, but using that exact phrase is going to be difficult. The prevailing wisdom is that keyword density should be 1%, or 1 out of every 100 words. That’s not that hard to do if you have a short post. It’s when you get into 500 or 1,000 word posts that it gets a little awkward.
Write for Readers, Not Spiders
Here’s where I differ from my SEO friends: I think it’s okay to keep your keyword density below 1% sometimes. Even a .25% is acceptable, or 1 time out of every 400.
That’s because you’re not going to win search with one blog post. You don’t need to swing for the fences on every pitch. You need to write several blog posts about your specialty for it to make a difference.
Here’s the key, it’s how well you write that makes the biggest difference. Do you write well enough that people want to read what you have to say? Or do you write a bunch of spider-oriented garbage that looks great to the search engines, but annoys your readers?
It’s not a matter of having more keywords than anyone else. I mean, I could write a sentence like “I love repairing refillable fountain pens, because repairing refillable fountain pens gives my life purpose and meaning, so I can continue making a living repairing refillable fountain pens.”
But who wants to read that? It’s clunky, cumbersome, and it looks like I crowbarred the keyword phrase into the post just so I could get them in there for the appropriate keyword density.
The short of it is, keyword density is not nearly as important if you don’t have readers. Yes, you can get them in there naturally, but don’t kill yourself or ruin your writing just to meet an acceptable percentage.
If you’re writing well, you’ll attract the readers (and the backlinks) needed to get your posts indexed and ranking high on search engines.
Photo: Flickr: J. Dueck
