I’ve seen so many webmasters obsess over keyword density. My latest encounter with this practice was while submitting an article to ezinearticles.
My naturally written articles kept getting rejected by their site because of “keyword density” issues. They measured word ratio and key phrase ratio and ignored synonyms. To adhere to their demands, I opened up a thesaurus and started using synonyms. Only did it for one article, then I simply gave up on submissions.
See, I believe in naturally flowing text. I don’t want to be counting words when writing. I want the search engines to gradually evolve until they can read texts as a human being does, rather than changing my writing to fit into what some people think the algorithm’s variables are.
That’s why posts like the one Matt Cutts made today make me happy. He refers to a post on the Google blog by Google engineer Steven Baker that discusses how Google’s trying to make computers understand language. The general idea being semantics are more than keyword density.
Google’s algorithm can actually read synonyms and even put them within context. This is so much more complex than number of times a keyword appears in your text, so stop worrying about that and just write naturally…
I too have abandoned ezinearticles – primarily because they are cheeky and nofollow links in original articles – its just giving away high quality content for free. btw you could nofollow your link to them
Re Google and its comprehension of language I have little doubt it will soon be autosuggesting entire sentences when you enter a search phrase.
.-= Roger´s last blog post ..Cutting Down Salt in Food – shhh – What about sugar? =-.
Thank you for visiting and commenting, Roger. I don’t believe in the nofollow tag. If I want my visitors not to visit a certain site, I just won’t link to it. I don’t think Ezine is that bad, just doesn’t suit my needs now – I’m ok with readers visiting them and as such, I’m not about to nofollow the link.
Twitter: sonlinebiz
says:
Are you serious about nofollow links in original articles. If it’s true what with the everyday news of building backlinks using Ezines.
Anyway I quit submiting to them after it took FOREVER for them to accept my article
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I think what Roger meant was they unfollow links in the body of articles. They want you to keep your links to the bio box at the bottom of the article. My guess is they’re seeing a decline in submissions over the past few months (just a guess though – no idea about it really).
Twitter: sonlinebiz
says:
With their turtle approach @ accepting free submissions, they definitely deserve the decline in article submissions.
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@neyne @SEOdojo had to vote for keyword density b/c I blogged about it today – http://bit.ly/7IZRb6
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
This is very interesting, I never knew a thing about Google and how it handled Synonyms, I am on my way over to Matt Cutts article right now to learn more. Thanks for sharing.
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Great news from Matt! This will only help real writers produce quality content without having to worry about keywords.
Personally, I never wrote for SEO purposes on my blogs but when I did a lot of corporate blogging, using keywords and phrases were always in the back of my mind.
.-= Gabe | freebloghelp.com´s last blog post ..Stop struggling — 54 article ideas for ANY niche =-.
Even according to Matt, researching keywords and using them is perfectly legitimate. Like you said, it’s about writing quality text for human readers, keeping what they’re looking for (your target phrase) in mind.
Twitter: InteractOne
says:
I agree with you totally about writing naturally. If I go to a website/blog you can usually tell right off the bat who is writing for search engines and who is writing for humans. I think as long as you focus the subject around the keywords you are trying to build traffic for. Further improvement with search engines and semantics can only help legit bloggers
.-= Thomas´s last blog post ..Reach Out and Get Those Links! =-.
Twitter: DennisEdell
says:
I write for readers also. When I finish the article, I skim back over it and fill in my SEO requirements and proofread.
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I am so glad to see your comment here and not in the Askimet puddle!
I saw the intial video from Matt the day he posted it but I was super tired, barely remember any of it. This is a nice little refresher, thank you.
.-= Extreme John´s last blog post ..Weekly Link Dump #6 =-.
Twitter: techfreaks
says:
Google has started showing Good results for synonyms too….But they do it intelligently! Only related synonyms are showed on higher preferences in Google..I love this move!
.-= Rohit Sane´s last blog post ..How to Make your Blog/Website more User-Friendly? =-.