One of the basic tenets of SEO is keyword density. You place a specific keyword (or keywords, if you’re feeling frisky) several times in an article at a specific density (usually between 1% and 4%) so that search engines read your content, identify the keyword, and rank your content higher than other, similar content based on that keyword.
It’s the heart of most online marketing and one of the most commonly request services we provide. But for many business owners, keyword articles may not be necessary. In fact, some companies may benefit from simply writing natural flowing content without any keyword focus at all.
Natural Long Tail Keywords
Online marketing can be extremely competitive. Standing out isn’t just about targeting specific keywords – it’s about developing content that meets the needs of the readers. Search engines are designed to pick up on usefulness of the content to a reader, and that usefulness is seen not only in the keyword you target, but also the combination of natural, long tail keywords that occur within the content simply through the writing.
Similarly, keywords are going to occur within the article naturally, even without targeting a keyword directly. That allows you to focus on the quality of the article, rather than whether you’ve integrated the specific keyword enough times to reach your desired density.
Developing Quality Content over Keyword Content
It’s not just about designing a higher quality article. At Great Leap, we’ve mastered keyword integration into SEO articles, and the vast majority of the keywords we use appear naturally throughout the article. The issue isn’t necessarily about quality itself. Rather, it’s about the usefulness of keyword targeting through the larger lens of developing quality content.
Think of it this way: If you target a keyword with an article, you’ve only utilized the keyword in that one article. That limits its usefulness, especially in the long run, because over time the article is going to age out of Google or your competitors may target the keyword themselves with more content/density. It also limits the information you can write about. Overall, it makes producing quality content for search engines more difficult, even if the article reads perfectly well.
It’s something you need to consider as you market your business. There is a place for keyword articles – especially for articles with a short shelf life placed in article marketing directories – but on your website, you may want to avoid worrying about keywords, and focus instead on developing content that is useful to your readers.
