SEO Explained - Page 10
Optimising your Page Content

There is some debate in the SEO community about whether the frequency with which words appear on a page (referred to as “keyword density”) still has a significant impact on SEO.   At Salsa Internet, we still do basic keyword density analysis, and ensure that the keyword phrases for which we are optimising that page – appear at least 3 or 4 times on that page.

Keyword Density

If you have 100 words of text on a page, and the term Nike appears only once, then this would be said to have a 1% keyword density.  If it appeared twice, then it would be 2% of course.

If you have 100 words on a page, and the keyword phrase “Nike Sneakers” appeared only once then it would have a 1/99 = 1.01% keyword density as there are only 99 unique two-word phrases that can appear in a list of 100 individual words.   Therefore if the term Nike Sneakers appeared twice, then it’s density would be 2/99 or 2.02%.

This is a bit theoretical, as in reality – search engines use techniques like stripping out “stop words” ie words such as “and”, “the”, “or” etc when doing keyword analysis.   Some SEO’s suggest that a keyword density of 7 – 10% for a single or two word keyword combo is ideal, but a simple way of tackling this issue is just to ensure that your most important phrases appear 3 or 4 times on a page for which you are optimising against that phrase.

Content to avoid

As with descriptions or meta tags, avoid keyword stuffing your content pages as this may end up resulting in you being penalised by the search engines….so it’s a fine balance between ensuring your words appear a reasonable number of times, and artificially stuff words into your page.

Also, do not try to “hide” text on your page.   So placing text on a page which is the same colour as the background, and therefore is invisible to the reader can result in you being penalised.   Google and other search engine penalties for this can be severe, so its best to ensure there is a reasonable contrast in the colour of your text vs the colour of the background.

Build a “theme” on your page

Search engines these days try to determine what you page is about.   As the search engine spiders are software based, and therefore mechanical in their processes and do not posses human intuition and understanding, they decide what a page is about by looking for related terms.   Therefore if your page is about Nike Sneakers, it’s important to build up a “theme” around this.   

So in building a page about Nike Sneakers, you could use terms sprinkled around the page such as Nike Sneakers, Shoes, Running Shoes, Athletics, Footwear, Laces, Marathon, Track, Field, Athlete and other terms like this.

You can use tools such as http://www.thesaurus.com to gain inspiration.  

A search on “sneaker” on this tool shows “aerobic shoe, basketball shoe, cross-trainer, high-topped sneaker, running shoe, sneaker, tennis shoe” which is not a bad list of words to try to include on this page in order to ensure that the search engines can figure out what your page is about.

Page 11 - On page headings & page length