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Keyword Focus and Density - Will They Really Help Your Blog?

Do keyword density and focus really matter in blogging? Or is it just a fantasy to think that they have anything at all to do with optimizing your blog for traffic?

There are actually two sets of factors involved in determining your blog’s search engine rankings. The onpage factors include keyword density and focus; in fact, the search engines will score your onpage effectiveness based to a great extent on their keyword density and focus. So yes, they definitely do matter.

But the search engines also look at offpage factors, and they too should be keyword focus optimized. What this means, quite simply, is that if you have chosen “Hamster Care” as key phrase around which you intend to optimize you blog, then somewhere in the anchor text of all your blog links you will want to have the phrase “Hamster Care.” There are those who argue that offpage factors are more significant when it comes to search engine optimization,  but even they are admitting that keyword density and focus are critical to the success of a blog.

If you wish to optimize your onpage factors, you should begin before you have actually built your blog. You need to find the key word related to your blog’s topic which is likely to generate the most traffic, and you can do that by researching the number of searches which have been performed on your prospective keywords. The Overture tool allows you to perform this research, and when you find the key words most often searched, you can run Google searches with each of those keywords to determine how many other webmasters have already chosen them as keywords.

The Google search will give you a fairly good idea of how much competition there is for each of your possible keywords, and you can also set up a Google AdWords account so that you can research the current pay-per-click bids for each keyword. But you only need that information if you intend to monetize you blog with AdSense ads.

When you’ve decided on the best keywords to use in you blog, you should insert them into each of your blog entries once or twice with every one hundred words, for an overall keyword density of about 1.5 percent.

Doing all you can to build you blog’s onpage and offpage keyword density and focus is the best strategy you have for maximizing your traffic. And if you are lucky enough to hit on an on topic keyword which has been the subject of less than a thousand searches, grab it. You may be able to claim that search group without spending a dime!

Tags: Blogging

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