Keyword Density: Quit Mixing with the Dark Side and Move onto White Hat Techniques

Keyword density is key to a properly SEOed website, but what exactly does that mean? If your site content needs to be dense with keywords, then couldn't you simply repeat the same word over and over throughout the page? That may have been the case years ago, but now you almost never return a first page of search results filled with completely irrelevant links. The search engines have gotten too smart for that, creating crawling and indexing techniques using more complex and intuitive algorithms to measure keyword density. And the pages written using the recycle-repeat keyword density method? They're ignored (eventually) by the search engines and are sometimes never allowed again to appear as Google or Yahoo search results. We deem these methods black hat tactics.

White hat tactics for keyword density exist, which you can read about here, on Joe Eitel's SEO Chat article on Keyword Density, but the most important factor all website developers and copywriters stress is that the best websites are those written for the viewer. If you're putting relevant content on a page and organizing it in such a way that makes it easy for your site viewers to read, keywords should generate organically in your writing. That's not to say you don't have to balance site content with SEO best practices, though.

Coming soon from the Web Works SEO & Web Design blog: More on Black Hat SEO Tactics.