Think back to that Memorial Day weekend barbecue that you attended with your friends. The weather was beautiful, the beverages were flowing, and the grill was hot. After several drinks you decided to eat a hot dog…and it was delicious. So you ate a second hot dog…and a third. After all, you’d had some drinks and, naturally, you think the more you eat, the better you’ll ultimately feel. Flash forward a half hour, and seven hot dogs, later and you found yourself unable to move and, shall we say, “under the weather”. That first hot dog worked to nourish and satisfy you, but as soon as you overdid it, you actually did more harm than good to yourself. Well…keyword density on your website is EXACTLY like that.

Okay, so it’s not exactly like that, but bear with me.

The term “keyword density” has been a big part of the web development nomenclature for many years. In the past, you would establish important keywords for your website and then strategically place those words throughout the site. Makes sense right? People use keywords when they search in Google, so if you place those keywords throughout your site, when people enter those words, your site will show up.

Recently, however, the whole notion of keyword density has come under considerable fire from web developers and SEO strategists alike. It has been reduced, in many cases, to a gimmick that does more harm than good.

So what happened?

Just like the hot dog incident, too much of a good thing was anything but good. Developers started jamming more and more keywords into their content with little or no concern for how they were using those keywords. The use of these words didn’t serve to improve the information being shared, but rather, served to trick Google into ranking the sites higher based on an exorbitant amount of keywords.

Well, the folks at Google are pretty smart. If a keyword or term is repeated too often, or used inappropriately, the crawlers will find it and mark that site or content as spam, preventing the site from appearing in search results. As a result, the notion of keyword density has fallen by the wayside in the minds of many web developers.

At Brain Bytes Creative, however, we caution against writing this strategy off completely. After all, just because eating seven hot dogs was too many, does that mean you shouldn’t eat anything at all?

It’s important to understand that when used properly, keyword density is still an effective strategy for web development and SEO. By performing the necessary research and gathering the right information, we learn what users are typing into search engines to find businesses like yours. By properly utilizing those keywords, as well as similar words, our copywriters create content that is important and informative to both the user and the web crawlers. Knowing WHERE, WHEN, and HOW to incorporate these keywords in a site’s content is of utmost importance when utilizing keyword density as a strategy for SEO.

So like your barbecue hot dog consumption, when utilizing keyword density on your website, understand that, when effectively executed, less is most definitely more.