»» Content is King

Engaging text. Seamless navigation. Impeccable layout. Your ideas, clean and concise. Comprehensive and comprehendible. Your website content is the thread that weaves it all together and sculpts your website into a single, flowing statement.

This is just as true for your human visitors as for your search engine friends. In fact, your human visitors may be more forgiving, for in the world of search engines there is only content. Take every graphic, every animation, every script, every moving object, pretty font and colorful chart. In fact, take everything you thought was cool about your site, flush it down the toilet, and you're looking through the eyes of a search engine.

According to Google, search engines see your site as if they were viewing it through a text-only browser such as Lynx.

»» Lynx Text-Browser Viewer

Enter the URL you want to view:


Lynx Viewer Copyright by DJ Delorie

Google says:  "If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you
from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

»» Website Content and Keyword Density

Definition: Keyword Density
The percentage of a keyword or keyphrase to the total number of words on the page.

The idea behind keyword density is simple: Include your keywords and phrases often throughout your web page and you will have a high keyword density. The search engines will determine that your web page is relevant to the keywords you used, and you should gain a better search engine ranking.

Of course, there is a catch. In fact, there are several catches:

• What is the "magic" keyword density number? Should your keyword density be 5%, 10%, 15%?
• Which keywords are counted? Do search engines only count the keywords in the viewable text or do they see and count keywords included in other parts of the HTML document such as in the description and keyword META tags?
• Do search engines count all words or do they ignore smaller words such as "a", "your" and "the"? And if they don't count all your words, which ones don't they count?

Unfortunately, the search engines aren't telling and every search engine has a different answer. So, the calculation for keyword density as a search engine sees it--can get fairly complex, quickly.

The best anyone can do (unless you work for Yahoo or Google in the programming department) is to study search engine results and draw some educated conclusions.

»» Keyword Density Analyzer

Click Here To Try Our Keyword Density Analyzer

We suggest you keep the keyword density for any given keyword to be between 3% and 10%. As far as META tags, some search engines count them but some don't. Use them as they should be used. Include your keywords in them, but don't go crazy.

It is the accepted view that most search engines do not count all of your text. Search engines will often ignore smaller "stop" words. Google ignores the following words: a about an and are as at be by com de edu for from how i in is it la of on or that the this to was what when where which who why will with www.

»» About the Author

Sean Odom runs a Houston, Texas based SEO Consulting firm specializing in search
engine marketing and Social Media Optimization.