When looking at your websites content and keyword density, you need to keep best search engine optimization (SEO) practices in mind. We’ve said it before and we’ll continue to say…content is king. Providing fresh and relevant content is key to staying on top of the search engines. However, if it’s not quality content that includes strong keyword focuses and organic SEO requirements, all your efforts are pointless. The leading SEO Plugin, Yoast, shared the logical reasoning behind what to consider when creating new content and keywords for your site.
Yoast’s goal is to guide you in optimizing your page to the best of its abilities and avoiding content that is over optimized. “The thing is, that in the end, you want to make sure your text is written for humans, not Google. If the keyword density of your text exceeds, for instance, 5%, it will already start to look a lot like spam, or what we call keyword stuffing. It’ll start to look like it’s written for search engines more than your human visitors. Just don’t do that. This is why a keyword density range of 0.5% and 2.5% is a nice indication of natural, yet optimized text as well.” Basically, Google is looking for your contents readability. They want to the content that humans are searching for, will read, thoroughly understand and leave satisfied with their search. They do want to clearly see what your keyword focus is and know that your content will cover that topic. While at the same time, not cram that topic into every aspect of your content to please the search engines. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
They don’t want to read and article about SEO and know it’s about SEO yet keep finding themselves reading the same sentences about SEO just written in different ways to make the point that SEO is discussed throughout; to only find in the end they didn’t get what they came for about SEO and left not wanting to hear about SEO every again. – See what we did there? When supplying content, think about what the end user wants to know and write it in a way that satisfies that need.
A neat feature coming down the pike…acknowledging synonyms. Too often we may find ourselves overthinking our keyword focus of choice based on the multiple ways a user could search for that same topic. Yoast provided the example of blogging about “forests” but also wanting to term is as “woods”. Search Engines will start to recognize similar terminology for the same keyword phrase or topic based on searches and how relevant your content is in comparison. For search engine marketers like us, this is a massive weight lifted as we can include multiple ways to term our focus keyword and trust that they will be recognized as well!
SEO has grown leaps and bounds in the last 5 years and organic optimization has continued to improve as Google’s algorithms match the human pattern of expectations. If you aren’t taking the extra few minutes to consider optimization when adding content or creating a new post on social media, you really need to! Talk with us to determine what tools you could be utilizing and best practices for your marketing goals.