| Jun 20 |
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In today’s marketplace people seem to obsess greatly over pagerank. It seems you’re nobody without pagerank. Today I thought I would put this misconception to the test using a simple experiment.
Search engines use two tools to determine your SERPs ranking: pagerank and keyword density. In today’s pagerank hungry environment the vast majority of people seem to forget the keyword density concept. Clearly it’s much easier to understand a rating from 1-10, than a more abstract concept such as keyword density.
The reality though, is that you will see pages on the first page of SERPs with a very low pagerank (even for some highly competitive keywords). How is this possible? Here’s how…
So what is keyword density?
Well, keyword density is simply a measure of the % that each word takes up in each article that you write. If I use the word ‘density’ 15/60 times I will have a keyword density of 25% for that keyword. Search engines identify keywords as having a density of between 2-5%. Any lower and they will not register as keywords. Any higher and your content will be flagged as spam. I generally aim for a keyword density of around 3.5% so that I’m safely within the safe-zone.
In addition, search engines discount ’stop words’ such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ so you need to take this into account using your estimations.
The experiment
Ok well, I find there’s nothing better than getting out there and doing a real experiment! Firstly, lets pick a high competition keyword area, lets say ‘Google Adsense’.
Step 1: Keyword selection
The first stage was to select my keywords. In this case I opted for the following:
“make money from/using google adsense”
Step 2: Buying a domain
Domain names are really important. If they are keyword rich they can really help your search engine performance. I did a quick search and found:
“www.howtomakemoneywithadsense.co.uk”
I paid a grand total of £4 to use this for 2 years. It is important to remember to always register a domain for 2 years as search engines penalise/sandbox 1 year registrations.
Step 3: Choosing titles and headers
I always like to think of this as a separate stage due to its importance. Higher weight is given to keywords that are used within the title, headers and description. I carefully selected some keyword rich content.
Step 4: Initial content writing
The next stage was to just write some content. Use good writing and try not to think about keyword density too much. This will make your content sound natural and bring out all the natural variations that people use in their normal searches.
Step 5: Design the web site
For this experiment I’m using a single page website since I know that search engines give preference to landing pages and that the vast majority of sites have incredibly keyword-poor landing pages. I decided to use an open, web2.0 style to improve readability. The whole site from start to finish took 2 hours to make. You can see the finished site here.
Step 6: The keyword density tweaking
The final stage in the process was the keyword density tweaking. I tested the site using the keyword density & prominence tool from ranks.nl. I find this to be the best tool I have used up till now.
My initial results showed that NONE of my keywords were within the magic 2-5% density. Some were ranking around the 1.5-1-8% region, but would not have been identified as high prominence keywords by search engines. This is the typical result from unguided content writing. Almost there…but not quite…
The next step was to start reinforcing my keywords. I went through my content and made minor modifications that caused my keyword density for my selected keywords to shoot up:
What many long tail seo theorists don’t realise is that by using keyword clusters in your tweaking you can also achieve high prominence for 2 word, 3 word and even 4 word phrases. This is where I would expect to make my real volume in search engine hits:
You must be doing some promotion!
Yes I will, but a bare minimum. I will submit the site to Google Sitemaps and link to it from some forum signatures. That’s it.
Victory over a blind man
In a couple of months I’ll return with the results of this experiment. Hopefully it will indicate that you can get search engine hits from keyword density alone. I hope this will make a few people consider how little pagerank actually counts for without keyword performance to back it up.
I would love to hear people’s views and feedback on this experiment. For those who missed it you can visit the actual site here.
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