What is a keyword? In order to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), one should attempt to understand the rules that search engines use to give weight measurement to each page it finds. Keywords are one of the measures search engines use to learn what your page/article is about.

Keywords are words relevant to your article that the search engine spiders find in your article. If your article is about beadwork, then the spider should find more references to beads and/or beading than anything else. Makes sense, right? The number of identical words the spiders find will tell the search engine what weight to give your article for that keyword.

So, keywords are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines.

Keyword Stuffing – Don’t Do It!

If a search engine finds 25 keywords about your topic in your 500-word article, then 35 ought to be better, right? How about 45? Or 50?

This may sound logical, but the “powers-that-be” at the search engine companies have caught on to this tactic and reworked the spider software to compensate. Now, if a spider finds too many of the same keyword in an article/on a page/in a blog post, they will instead, penalize your page. This will definitely affect the search engine rankings of that page. It might even get your site blacklisted if the spiders see this tactic overmuch on your site.

The Right Density

So, what is the right density—number of keywords—for your article? There are as many differing opinions on this as there are writers out there, but generally, for a 500-word article, 5% is a good place to start. 5% of 500 is 25 keywords.

There are numerous eBooks about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) available and it would benefit you to read up on this subject a bit more, because, in the end, the percentage of keywords in your articles is a personal choice. You may need to do a little experimenting/tracking to see which articles rank higher after awhile and note what percentage of keywords you used.

The Right Placement
Placement of the keywords is important, too. It may seem logical to spread out your keywords evenly throughout the article, but in actuality, more in the early paragraphs and a sprinkling of the remainder throughout the rest of the article is optimal.

Have you ever noticed on a SERP page, that, if there is no description in the Meta Tags for the search engine to use, the search engine will copy the first 150 or so words of the page and present it along with your page link? Having plenty of your keywords there will tell readers exactly what they have found.

There you have it, the “quick and dirty” about keyword usage in your articles. Don’t overdo it and the search engines will love you long time for it!

***Special Offer***
Brad Callen has written a VERY GOOD eBook on Search Engine Optimization, titles SEO Made Easy. Feel free to download it from here: SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen

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