Source : Seopulse.com

Probably one of the most debatable topics in search engine optimization is keyword density, defined as the ‘relative amount frequency of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a web page.’ So heated have the contentions been that even people considered to be SEO experts can’t seem to get down to a consensus about its use. In this article we explore the different standpoints about keyword density and give you ideas on implementing your own keyword density campaign.

Defining keyword density
Keyword density refers to how often certain keywords appear in a page (as a percentage of the total text). To get a page’s keyword density, simply divide the number of times a keyword by the total number of words on that page. Back in the days when search engines were not yet as smart as they are today, some websites listed literally thousands of unrelated keywords and phrases either on hidden pages or at the very bottom of the layout to boost their search engine rankings. But this was later circumvented by technology – search engines soon considered these sites to be ‘spammers’ and stopped reading them. Web owners seeking to increase traffic now rely on actual content for keyword density. But this new trend has spawned differing opinions, especially on the matter of keyword ratio.

Keyword density: How much is too much?
Keyword density is still, by far, one of the greatest mysteries of SEO. Different SEO experts have so far not arrived on a consensus regarding the optimum keyword density percentage. The opinions are so diverse – some say that the ideal keyword density is definitely lower than 2 percent, but some argue that articles should go as far as 20 percent! The story seems to be different for different people. While it is said that the technology of modern search engines enable them to shun high-density content that is obviously written solely to boost rankings, some webmasters still claim that 50% keyword density still works. For most sensible website owners, though, the answer is simple common sense. When people go online, they are looking for useful information – and they most likely to leave sites with keyword densities too high that the articles cease to make sense. That is why many website owners are now less concerned about keyword density – they instead focus on relevance and quality. You yourself can be a judge of whether your keyword content is too high. Try to read the text out loud and see if it sounds too repetitive – if the text annoys you, it will most likely annoy the reader, too. At the end of the day, quality is still key – keep your content sensible and relevant, so that readers keep coming back and you build a good reputation. The rankings will follow.

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Article Marketing is one of the best ways to advertise your business online. Here are just some of the reasons:

• You can reach a global audience for promoting your products.
• You can effectively sell whatever product or service you have - however expensive or inexpensive it is.
• You are establishing your and your business’ credibility by exhibiting your knowledge on the subject.
• You can create a brand identity for your business.
• You can make sure your brand gains in re-sell value, opening a whole new avenue of business for you.
• You can pre-sell your product to your potential customers.
• Article marketing costs almost nothing, but can gets niche-based international promotion for your products.

Several of the companies are already investing significantly in article marketing. There are hundreds of article directories on the Internet with millions of articles on them promoting businesses. It is an undeniable fact that Article Marketing is the way to go.If you have an online business, you should consider using articles to drive traffic to it.

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Source : Webconfs.com

Making efforts to optimize a site is great but what counts is how search engines see your efforts. While even the most careful optimization does not guarantee tops position in search results, if your site does not follow basic SEO truths, then it is more than certain that this site will not score well with search engines. One way to check in advance how your SEO efforts are seen by search engines is to use a search engine simulator.

Spiders Explained
Basically all search engine spiders function on the same principle – they crawl the Web and index pages, which are stored in a database and later use various algorithms to determine page ranking, relevancy, etc of the collected pages. While the algorithms of calculating ranking and relevancy widely differ among search engines, the way they index sites is more or less uniform and it is very important that you know what spiders are interested in and what they neglect.

Search engine spiders are robots and they do not read your pages the way a human does. Instead, they tend to see only particular stuff and are blind for many extras (Flash, JavaScript) that are intended for humans. Since spiders determine if humans will find your site, it is worth to consider what spiders like and what don’t.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?!
Flash, JavaScript and image text are NOT visible to search engines. Frames are a real disaster in terms of SEO ranking. All of them might be great in terms of design and usability but for search engines they are absolutely wrong. An incredible mistake one can make is to have a Flash intro page (frames or no frames, this will hardly make the situation worse) with the keywords buried in the animation. Check with the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool a page with Flash and images (and preferably no text or inbound or outbound hyperlinks) and you will see that to search engines this page appears almost blank.

Running your site through this simulator will show you more than the fact that Flash and JavaScript are not SEO favorites. In a way, spiders are like text browsers and they don’t see anything that is not a piece of text. So having an image with text in it means nothing to a spider and it will ignore it. A workaround (recommended as a SEO best practice) is to include meaningful description of the image in the ALT attribute of the <IMG> tag but be careful not to use too many keywords in it because you risk penalties for keyword stuffing. ALT attribute is especially essential, when you use links rather than text for links. You can use ALT text for describing what a Flash movie is about but again, be careful not to trespass the line between optimization and over-optimization.

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