A Tool for Keyword Density – But do you really need it anymore?

OK, I know that some of you have probably read some old articles on the web or in a book or someone tried to sell you some software, all of which is focused on Keyword Density for SEO and you have already made up your minds that a Tool for Keyword Density will help optomize your Website and bring you magic free traffic.

Well. It Won't.

And I know some of you don't want to hear this and just want a free keyword density tool

So Here is a free keyword density tool and a link for a more automatic one that plugs into worpress. For the rest of you continue on after these free tool for Keyword Density links and learn what is more important.

This tool will install in yoiur google toolbar. it is from SEOChat.com. It will let you enter any website or web page URL and analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines). It will avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term, however (for example: “designing with CSS” would go through, even though “with” is a stop word).

Add this tool to Google Toolbar

Here is a keyword density plugin for wordpress. This is great because it does it all on the fly, as you add or edit a post in wordpress. It has a lot of legitimate SEO benefits beyond Keyword density.

1) The Keyword Startistics Plugin for Wordpress. It is available for free thru your Plugins tab in your wordpress dashboard. You can click on this link to go to the Keyword Statistics website. It is all free.

In a Nutshell the keyword statistics Plugin is a free tool for keyword density that automatically gives you the density of the most used 1, 2 and 3 word keyword phrases on any page that you edit in your blg.

Do you reaaly need a Free Tool for Keyword Density? 

A number of years ago no one asked "Is Keyword Density Important"?. It was a given. It was an art. but a lot has changed in the last few years and keyword density, measuring keyword density, keyword density tools, well they just aren't as important as they used to be.

What is more important then Keyword Density? Well here is my short list and then we will list an analysis done by Dr. E. Garcia on the topic of "Is Keyword Density" a good measure?  But first here is my list of the first 3 things that come to mind in what is more important then Keyword density:

1) Doing hi quality keyword research is far more important.

• Identify those Keywords that are relevent to your Niche, to your Website, to your current page and to your readers.
• Identify the subset of those keywords that you have an opportunity to rank on based upon competition
• Use a quality Keyword Software tool like Keyword Elite 2.0 or Keyword Research Pro to help you do all of this. They are automated, wholistic and give you a competitive edge over people using just the google keyword tool.Your traffic depends on it.

2) Keyword Placement is far more important then is Keyword Density. Click here to read our article on the top 12 Wordpress SEO tips that deals a lot with Keyword Placement.

3) Quality of articles and readability and navigation of the website is far more important then is keyword density (UNLESS your website is a 1 page sales letter / splash page aimed at affiliate marketing. Then 1 and 2 above still apply as king of the hill).

Dr. E. Garcia explained why keyword density was a bad measure of relevancy in The Keyword Density of Non Sense.

• Search engines may place significant weight on domain age, site authority, link anchor text and usage data.
• The page title is typically weighted more than most any other text on the page.
• The meta keywords tags, comments tags, and other somewhat hidden inputs may be given less weight than page copy.
• Page copy which is bolded, linked, or in a heading tag is likely given greater weighting than normal text.
• Weights are relative. If your whole page is in an H1 tag that looks shady, and it does not place more weight on any of the text since all the page copy is in it.
• You probably want to avoid doing things like bolding H1 text as it is doubtful it will make a page seem any more relevant.
• Lots are queries are a bit random in nature. When people tweak up page copy for an arbitrarily higher keyword density they typically end up removing some of the modifier terms that were helping the page appear relevant for many 3 and 4 word search queries.
• Semantic related algorithms, may look at supporting vocabulary when determining the relevancy of a page. If you pulled the keyword phrase you were targeting out of your page copy would it still be easy for a search engine to mathematically model what that phrase was and what your page is about given the supporting text?
• When people focus too much on keyword density they tend to write content which people would not be interested in reading or linking at.

Before worrying about Keywords and SEO you MUST Understand your Market, Your Niche, Your Blog audience

Before you can develop a list of words and phrases for Keywords and SEO you need to understand what people search for when they enter a search into Google or Yahoo when they want information like what is in your Blog or Website. To figure this out you can

• Start by actually entering words and phrases about your blog or Website into Google and checkout the search results. Is are they what you expected? While you are at it, check out the competitions websites to see what they are talking about.
• Use the Google Adwords free keyword suggestion tool (see the article link a few bullet points down from here to access it). Enter some of the keywords and phrases in there and see how often people search on them every month. See the different variations that the Keyword Tool shows you.
• Continue to check out other websites that you find on the same subject and learn the lingo they and the users use. Read the blogs and the comments.
•  Go to this web page which has links to a lot of FREE Google tools that will help you do this; http://wordpress-how-to-wp.com/Google-keyword-tool-links-and-seo-tools-links-and-information

Develop a list of Target Keywords that you wish to use for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

There are a few places where you should spend money on your blog this is one of them. An automated  keyword Software System will give you a huge advantage over the competition when it comes to SEO and getting free traffic from the search engines.:

• Click on this link to read about Keyword Research Pro the best tool out there http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/keyword-research-leader-keyword-research-pro-releases-new-version
• Click on this link to read about Keyword Elite 2.0 the second best tool in our opinion http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/keyword-software-guides-keyword-elite-2-0-review
• Click on this link for a list of 5 free Keyword tools if you really really don't want to spend any money:
• http://wordpress-how-to-wp.com/5-free-keyword-tools-for-keyword-research.

Whatever the tool you should do these basic keyword and SEO steps

 Find relevant keyword and keyword phrase niches

Group closely related keywords into related primary and secondary keyword pairs that you could focus one page on

Then Evaluate your keyword and Keyword phrase niches for SEO potential. Click on this link for an article on Keyword Research and evaluation in 6 simple steps: http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/6-keyword-research-steps

Then Prioritize your keyword and Keyword Phrases that you want to use in your posts and articles

              Then Focus on building a page of content for each keyword or phrase. 

Each Page should focus on 1 to 2 Keywords and related SEO

Your page will be targeting many more than those two keywords – they are your starting point and your focus

• To get started, target each page’s SEO on a primary and secondary keyword.
• Don't try to jam your entire keyword list into your home page you WILL NOT get ranked for all those keywords and without a focus, Google will most likely place no emphasis on the page at all!
• Don’t make the common mistake of initially using different pages to target the same keywords.  It may seem hard not to if your Website is on a given subject. But even then you want to target unique phrases for each phrase. IF you run out of phrases and keywords from your original research list you can always do more keyword research and market niche research and add to your list.

When it Comes to Keywords and SEO Use your target keywords and Phrases in these specific places

Use your primary and secondary target keywords in the following positions on your page:

• Page title tag
• Description tag
• Note that for the Page Title and Description and Keywords Meta Tags use the Keywords Statistics plugin if your blog uses wordpress. Click on this link to read a review of the keywords statistics plugin. It is quick, easy and it rocks for Keywords and SEO!: http://wordpress-how-to-wp.com/the-keyword-statistics-plugin-for-wordpress-search-engine-optimization
• Headlines, sub-headlines and body text
•  Internal and external links (use text)

For your Keywords and SEO efforts to work, you need content that is interesting and related

Content is where the rubber hits the road!

• Your content must relate to the keywords that you are targetting. You can't fool the search engines and if you could it would take more work then is required to give them what they want: Value adding information of a given subject.
• The search engines nowadays do contextual analysis and if the heading and keywords do not flow with the content they will be ignored. page will be targeting many more than those two keywords – they are your starting point and your focus
• Try to write 1000 words, no less then 200 or it will be ignored. The focus should be on your primary and secondary keyword. But sprinkling in long tailed keywords from your keyword list will give the site more "Juice" and more opportunity to getr ranked for related keywords.
• The Content should be informational and easy to read. If its not, even if you get people there, they will just leave and never come back.
• Add value. For example this article gives links to free tools and related information saving the readers time. Give your readers what they are looking for and Google will send more readers your way and they will all come back! And that is what you want from Keywords and SEO!

To Research Keywords is crucial to the success of your Website. Period. It is the basis for generating website traffic from the search engines. Choosing the right Website keywords can produce a lot of traffic and get your Website ranked high in search engine listings while choosing the wrong Website keywords will leave your Website on page 100 or worse, with barely any visitors at all.

So it is not a question of To research keywords or not to do  research keywords, you must do it!

Many Website owners think they know which Website keywords are best suited for their search engine optimization strategy. But unless you know exactly who your target market is and what terms they use to find businesses like yours, chances are you need to research keywords very seriously to find the most effective search terms. To research keywords properly will give you an idea of what keywords your potential customers are searching for, how much competition there is for any given term, and which Website keywords are the most popular.

Look, if you learn anything from this article learn this (and check out the 5 links at the end of the article):

If you DO NOT do quality keyword research and apply it to your Website it will most likely fail – meaning that it will end up at the end of the search engine listings and no one will find it out of the millions of other Website's!

It is important for you to know what search terms your potential customers are looking for. The keywords your customers are likely use when searching for your product may not be the ones you would think, especially if your business is one that has a lot of industry jargon. You may be tempted to use Website keywords that don’t relate to your business just to bring in traffic, but this technique will always backfire, because the traffic it does generate is not interested in your Website.

To Research Keywords will also give you an idea of how great the competition is for any given keyword or keyword phrase. It is important to know how many other Website's use the same keywords and how many people are searching for them. The most effective Website keywords for your optimization strategy are the ones that are searched for the most with the least amount of competition. Weigh each keyword’s popularity with the amount of other Website's already using it. You should always include the most popular ones but concentrate on getting ranked for the Website keywords that have less competition.

OK here are links to some great articles that will tell you how to research keywords, show you free tools to use and show you some cool keyword software you can buy to help you to research keywords and SEO your Website or blog:

1)  Click here for an article on the Top 5 FREE keyword tools with links and a review of each one.

2)  Click here to read how to research keywords in 6 simple steps

3)  Click here to read an article on the Keyword Elite tool

4)  Click here to read an article on the Keyword Research Pro Tool (the best in my opinion)

5)  Click here to read a great article on 12 SEO Tips that you MUST KNOW!

OK Here is a great beginners guide to SEO in a video tutorial form. Once again, I always recommend that everyone read and watch everything they can on SEO, keyword research, keyword analysis, niche markets and SEO!

But this SEO video is really good. It covers all of the basics from defining just what the heck Search Engine Optimization is, what "Organic Results" are, what is meant by Keyword Research, Pay per Click, Competitor analysis, etc.

Now that I think about it, so many people just think that Keyword Analysis is just keyword research. Take all the hoopla around the  Google wonder wheel. Heck, thats just brain storming. And most peoples Keyword Research will just get them keywords that hopefully are representative of search terms that people use when searching for products or information in their Niche Market.

But what about your competition? Yes, you may find a keyword with 1.5 million searches a month. but how many Website are competing for search engine ranking on that one Keyword term? What are your chances with a new Website, of ever seeing the first page of Google for that term?

That is why this video on Search Engine Optimization so good. It gets down to basics like this, and I love to say this line, "But wait, Theres more"

It tells you all of the following as well:, on page & off page optimization, Meta tags, header tags, keyword density, URLs, site maps, xml site maps, google webmaster tools, link development, directory submission, local directories, online yellow pages, one-way links, two-way links, three-way links, article submission, rss feed distribution, blog submission, and online press release optimization.

OK, so checkout this SEO video tutorial, Checkout our other articles on Keyword Analysis, Keyword research – and especially on the industries leading Keyword software System Keyword Research Pro which just released a new version of their software in April 2010. here is a link to the software review on our site: http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/keyword-research-leader-keyword-research-pro-releases-new-version

Incoming search terms for the article:

• Basic Keyword Research Video Tutorial
• keyword research tutorials
• tutorial video Good Keywords v1 5

 "A reader has asked:I'd really like some keyword/SEO software that kind of automates stuff and makes the whole keyword thing simple. i hear wordtracker is great. but in your opinion, whats the must-have keyword-selecting software (or site)?"

I have talked at length about Keyword Selection tools vs Keyword Software Systems in the past And I will try to some up the differences in whats out there for you and anyone else who is interested in obtaining better traffic thru the search engines.

Here are my top nuggets when it comes to Keyword Analysis, Keyword software, SEO and targeted traffic:

1) Before getting caught up on keywords, understand your market, where you fit in that market, what you want to do in that market, the terminology of that market, your competitors in that market and the realities of ecommerce/affiliate marketing in that market. If you fail to take the time to do this step then you will never have a focused plan for your blog or web business and your success will be greatly limited.

2) After writing down the answers to the question in 1 (along with your Business Plan for what your goals are and how you want to try to achieve those goals) you can start looking into the wonderful world of SEO and Keywords. To Start you can browse are many many articles on the subject at: http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/category/keywords-software-articles.

To make it easy I will give yon some basic KEYWORD LAWS (according to me anyhow):

1) Researching Keywords with a free tool Like wordtracker or google adwords or whatever is NOT ENOUGH!  If you are serious bout this then you need to invest $50-$100 (you don't need to spend more IMO) on a high quality Keyword Software Toll like Keyword Research Pro.

2) Keyword Research is not enough because it is more then just finding keywords for your niche. you need to analyze what keywords your competitors are using, you need to understand the competition for the keywords and how often they are used by ALL the major search engines – not just google. Keyword Research Pro Software will help you with all this and a dozen more critical things.

3) You need to not just analyze the "best" keywords but you need to analyze how they are searched for in phrases so you can use those phrase. 90% of your competitors are just going to try to find the quick top 3 keywords using wordtracker or google or something and try to compete for those words. LET THEM!

4) While they all try to get ranked for the top 3 words you do the research for phrases and long tailed keywords that everyone else is ignoring so your pages can get rankled as #1 in google for those terms. Again Keyword Research Pro will do this analysis for you in MINUTES not days. So will some of the more expensive packages.

5) Using Google, wordtracker or even google wonder wheel (puke) is OK for brainstorming if you want to but it is only a small part of the keyword research and analysis stage.

6) Then you need to learn about all the places on your Website that you can use those keywords. yes there are many more places then just in the articles or in the websites Keywords meta tag. How about with the pictures? How about in the headings, in the file location names and etc. To find out more on this read some of the articles in the link I mentioned above.

7) Once you have your site up and running use one of the many free Website analysis tools like Google webmaster to analyze where you are ranking for what Keywords. This is ESSENTIAL. You did all the work to understand your market and where you fit in it and your business plan to take a piece of it, You did all the work (allot faster and easier with Keyword Research PRO but still a lot of work) to find the terms and phrases, and then you did all the work to site the articles and implant the keywords and phrases and now you are just going to sit back and wonder why the traffics not coming???

NO! Be smart, use a tool that analyses the traffic to your Website and what terms you rank on what pages for on various search engines and then do the analysis to determine why certain phrase or keywords are not working for you! Again Google analytics and google webmaster are free and a great place to start!!

I could go on and on but this is plenty to start with. Again you can go to the section of our Website that is dedicated to FREE high quality, Keyword Research and SEO articles and get all the information you need on this subject!!

The Keyword Software Guide has been getting a lot of questions from new comers about the basics of Keywords, keyword selections and basic Keyword based SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So we have decided to create a series of articles to help people understand this super important aspect of website development.

If you already know the basics, or you just want to optimize your website for the search engines without going thru the long learning curve, we recommend that you cut to the chase and take a look at Keyword Research Pro. Keyword research pro is the best software tool on the marketplace to help you quickly and easily optimize your website or blog for the search engines. Keyword Research Pro automates the learning process and helps you to immediately start to drive targeted traffic to your website.

About the Keyword software guides 3 part series on all things keyword related. One of the problems we are seeing a lot are people with wordpress blogs that have simply included a plugin like all in one SEO and expected it to magically optimize their website for keywords. I hate to tell you but that is not the case. While that’s a great tool it does NOT do everything you need.  If you have read many of the articles here on the Keyword Software Guide website, you will know that there are a lot of things to consider in Keyword selection:

1)      What is your theme? What are you blogging about or what is the audience you are trying to reach. If your site is an ecommerce site, then what are you selling and who are you trying to sell to and what are they looking for?

2)      Once you have answered the above you can start using a keyword tool to research what people actually type into a search engine like Google to find products or information like yours.

3)      Once you find the most popular terms you can find a tool to tell you which of those terms have the most competition. For example it may be great that the term “Dogs” has a bazillion searches a month, but guess what? There are probably a bazillion websites that have been around longer than yours, with 10 times the content, that are ranked highly by Google (meaning that if you type that in on Google search, you come up in the first few pages)  for the keyword “Dogs”.

4)      So you need a tool or a method to help you determine which keywords you can use that are not so heavily used that you will have a chance to get ranked highly for them.

5)      Here at the Keyword Software Guide You will see a lot of talk about “Long tailed keywords”. Picture a graph of your search terms in relation to traffic provided. That graph would have a peak for your most popular term, and then get shorter and shorter down to the least trafficked term. The idea of long tail is that the bulk of your traffic is made from these lesser terms, thus the long tail. Optimum Keyword search is not only about gaining the initial conversion, it’s about increased visibility to a targeted audience.

6)      IN addition, the use of combination of words to get at keywords that are specific to your niche but that your competitors are not alreay using!

7)      So great you did all that, now what?  Now you have to design your website and your articles to be optimized for those keywords that you decide to use.

Needless to say that selecting a keyword strategy, or even just selecting the best keyword software tool or keyword plugin, can get very complicated to do right. We mentioned the all in one SEO plugin for word press and this is a great example of where automation on websites is both good and bad. Plugins like this and others are great for helping to make sure that you use all the meta tags at your disposal (Meta tags are places in the websites code where you can insert search if you did not do a good job on the first 5 steps, then your articles may lack the keywords that you want to focus on. If that is the case then the SEO plugin will end up focusing on whatever words you used the most like “If and else but or, etc). Really, You would not believe how many websites I have seen whose articles have automated keywords like these and the owners wonder why people are only spending 20 seconds on their website and not clicking on any of their adsense advertisements!

So once again I think you should read articles like the ones here at the Keyword Software Guide and learn as much as you can about keyword optimization. But in the end, you really really really need to get a high quality tool like Keyword Software Pro to help you do everything we have named so far  in an easy, automated, assisted process that guarantees success! If you want traffic coming to your website, if you want to monetize it and you want to have success, then a tool like the Keyword Software Pro is the best investment that you can make in your website – next to learning everything  you can about your market and websites in general!

OK, a long introduction eh?  In Part 1 of our series on all things keyword we will look at keyword analysis, competition and long tailed keywords. We will talk about a few of the tools out their like the free ones available thru places like Google and some of the purchased systems like Keyword Software Pro and others to give you a taste of the functionality that they offer and how they can help you with the process!

As I mentioned in another article on this site I am not a huge fan of using Googles keyword research software Wonder Wheel for Keyword Research.

Wonder wheel basically allows you to enter a keyword for a niche you want to research and then it comes up with a spider shaped chart with each arm pointing to a related keyword term. Click on any one of those terms and you come up with another set of keywords related to that term.

While doing keyword research this way is OK – it allows you to explore related keywords and keywords that are related to those keywords, the Google wonder wheel software is pretty basic and it does not do the extensive competitor analysis of other keyword research software like Keyword Research Pro does. It is basically a one trick pony. But it does have extra applications.

Here is a video from a library. In the school that sent this to me they apparently uses the Wonder Wheel Keyword research tool to help students narrow down their search results and get great access to sites that will provide them with background information on their specific topic. Cool huh?

I could see where it would be a good aid for researching information in this manner. Finding terms related to terms. Almost like meta data – data about data.