‘Keyword density’ is a phrase that is often bandied about as if it is the Holy Grail of high search engine listings.

Basically it means the percentage of the text on a page that is your keyphrases.

Most experts recommend that you aim for a keyword density of between 2 and 8%.

I’ve tested this quite extensively over the last 13 years and have ranked on the front page of Google for some very competitive phrases with keyword densities ranging from 1% to 18%.

If you’re stuck for pages to optimise, it’s better to use the longer versions of your keyphrase than the shorter.

So for example instead of using ‘gift hamper’ use ‘gift hampers’, instead of ‘clean carpets’ use ‘cleaning carpets’ etc.

If someone searches for the shorter version (gift hamper or clean carpets) they have a good chance of finding you.

If, on the other hand, you optimised for the shorter version, then people searching for the longer version would have no chance of finding you at all.

Sometimes it is necessary to build your website in directories, with different directories for different sections of the site.

This makes it easier to control the structure of a website, and also plays in to the hands of the search engines.

Name each directory after one of your keyphrases if possible, and group all pages related to that phrase within the directory.

For example;

www.joanna-cleaning.co.uk/cleaning-in-northampton/cleaning.html

In the above example, the phrase targeted is ‘cleaning in northampton’.

We could even have gone one step further and had www.joannacleaning.co.uk/cleaning-in-northampton/cleaning-in-northampton.html

Either way we’re getting the keyphrase in in a way that isn’t spam.

You may not have been able to get the keyword rich domain name of your choice (and as we’ll discussed elsewhere, that’s not the end of the world), but you can still incorporate your keyphrases into the address of your pages.

For each page of your website, decide the most important phrase, and name the page with that phrase in mind:

- www.mylifecoachingcompany.com/financial-life-coaching.html
- www.accountantsrus.com/accountancy-bedford.html
- www.businessconsultancyexperts.com/small-business-coaching.html

It all counts towards the keyword count when Google comes a calling.

We Build Web Pages provide a tool that will take 2 different lots of search phrases and give you back every possible combination.

Some of the results are a little amusing, but it did throw up some combinations I hadn’t thought of when I was testing it.

The results page also links to searches for the phrases in Google, Yahoo and MSN, which allows you to see the competition level.
http://www.webuildpages.com/search/