Keyword Density is Important for SEO

If you have spent any time doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) than you are probably wondering if I've lost my mind by saying that keyword density is important for SEO. For a number of years there was a lot of talk about keyword density being an important concept for SEO best practices, specifically that there was a legitimate mathematical component to search engine algorithms that figured in keyword density. For the record, which has been proven by smarter mathematicians than myself, keyword density as a mathematical component that improves Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP) results is a fantasy. However, I still called it important and still included mention of it in the Delphic Sage Writing Guide for SEO. Why?

There are actually 3 reasons that I promote keyword density, and still talk about it with clients. They are:

I hate to beat a dead horse - but I am still surprised at how many companies do not measure their online marketing efforts. This post is aimed at the basics of ROI measurement for web and online marketing campaigns.

Working in the online marketing space targeting small - mid size firms, I hear alot of marketing depts saying we have a website b/c it's important for our customers to access our information, but then they don't really know how their customers are using their website.

• Where are your customers going?
• Which pages are most valuable?
• How are users interacting with your site (sequence, contact forms, purchase behavior, etc.)?
• How many people can't find the information they are looking for and quickly bail out of the site?

In this day and age, a website is integral to a company's success and just about everyone already has some type of web presence. More often than not, we are redesigning existing sites for our clients. Of course we get work from companies that are rebranding, merging, or funded startups where we do get a clean slate, but more than half our work is a web redesign. So we have experience in making the improvement a sensible, empowering and motivating leap forward. In some cases this involves dynamic functionality as well as the visual change but for this post we will be focusing more on the visual (the dynamic nature of a site is almost always unique, but when we discuss the look, we can apply that philosophy across any project).

Much like the approach to a design from scratch, we focus our efforts on the following pieces of the puzzle to recognize business value form web redesign projects. The difference is that we will take into consideration improvements in these specific areas:

• Visual Aesthetic
• Usability - Navigation & Site Architecture
• Functionality
• Content