Do you know anything about keywords? Essentially, they educate the search engines about your content. However, using too many is a bad thing. Keyword density is vitally important and you should learn how to get this right to achieve a perfect combination.

Besides straightforward keywords and appropriate density, there are other ways to optimise. Use keyword phrases. Many keywords are well known, these days. For example, if you put “chocolate” into a search engine, you will get millions of returns. Someone can wade through the first ten pages (highly unlikely) and still not find exactly what they are looking for.

Instead of doing this, they will approach it differently. Instead of one word they will enter something like “chocolate peanut butter cookies.” This is definitely more specific. If you are in the business of selling recipes, then you would be much better off using the second phrase instead of just that one key word.

Keyword Myth Revealed.

When it comes to online business development, you might think that common sense is the best approach to keyword selection, but you are not always right. Your mind says that if such and such keyword is the one you should be using to attract customers, then it should appear everywhere. So far, you are right.

This is where many people take the wrong road. You don’t want to be stuffing your content so that it appears to be a keyword sandwich. This might have been okay at one time but search engines have become much smarter. They are smart enough to know that a keyword is not going to appear in every third sentence as the normal course. This is generally called keyword stuffing.

Keyword Density.

A typical search engine is difficult for the average person to understand as it is composed of a tricky mix of algorithms. All we know is that it tells the bots to do their thing and they do it. They search for keywords that are entered into the search box on thousands and thousands of sites, blogs and the lot, indexed all over cyberspace.

Keyword density is a measure of how many of those particular words appear within text. As an example, a 500 word article should contain a given number of keywords appropriate to that piece of text. So-called Internet experts used to say that “safe” keyword density was anything between 3 and 10%.

But, search engines have their own ideas about what constitutes the proper density for their rankings. Now, it can be as low as 1-3%. This would mean that your keyword should occur only between five and 15 times in a typical 500 word article. Most err on the lower end just to be safe. After all, if you encountered the same keyword 15 times in a 500 word article you would likely think this to be strange, depending on the subject matter.

Keyword density also takes into account the number of words in your target keyword. Long tail online business marketing has become popular and can further focus your content and website for a larger, well-defined market.

But keyword density also works for your website development in general. Using keywords in picture tags, as anchor text within content and as subheadings as well as headlines will also get you noticed. The content will get people to visit you over and over, but your entire website will be the linchpin that can help you gain and stay on the first page of search results.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Executive Virtual Assistant who assists businesses and individuals with achieving their professional goals. Want to find out more about online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Now!