Keyword Density
Keyword density is used throughout the search engine industry to help the search engines rank web pages on their content. Keyword density is the measurement of a certain keyword against all the words on the page. For example if you have a page with 50 words on and your keyword appears several times, your keyword density will be much higher than if you have a page with 1000 words and your keyword only appears several times. It also takes into account whereabouts on the page the text is placed, e.g. in the title, as a heading, in the main content etc. Some search engines such as Google will take into account how close together keywords are repeated, and how relevant the keyword, and how natural the content is, e.g. is it written by a person, or have they just thrown some keywords together to get their ranking up.
Many search engines have different rules when it comes to keyword density. Sites such as MSN and Yahoo allow you to have as higher keyword density as you like, however search engines like Google may well penalise you for using a high keyword density within your content.
Many websites try and abuse the keyword density by using several techniques for example “Keyword stuffing”, “Spamdexing” and also “link bombing”, in the hope that these techniques will get them higher a higher ranking. These techniques are considered highly unethical in the SEO industry.
Keyword stuffing usually involves filling the Meta tags, or the pages content, with text which is unrelated to the site and the sites content itself. With this technique the website may try hiding the text from the user by setting the texts colour to the same as that of the background colour, or even placing text behind the content which is visible to the user.
Spamdexing normally involves the website owner writing a keyword or a number of keywords repeatedly on a page, they may even link back to a site which is normally owned by the same website.
Link bombing (aka Google bombing) is a technique which involves multiple websites placing the same link on their site, often to political or religious sites, and putting humorous text within the link. For example if a few years ago you were to search Google for “liar” you would see Tony Blair, or if you searched for “miserable failure” you would be shown the White House’s biography of George Bush. In the past companies have set competitions for websites to try and get the best ranking for phrases like “nigritude ultramarine”, “seraphim proudleduck” and also “crystalline incandescence”.
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