Are keywords dead?

Back in March, we asked this question. Most of you thought if they weren’t dead, they were probably on life support. Here’s what Google had to say recently -

Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.

What does this mean? Should we eliminate keywords? There are those who say save the space, don’t include them. Google acknowledges keywords neither help or hurt you at this point (your not penalized for having them), and there are some other sites that still look at them. Further, Google hasn’t ruled out that it may revisit using them in the future.

Bottom line it’s the content that makes the difference. If you want to have your site show up in Google, there will be need to be some keyword density in your text.  Keyword density refers to the frequency that the keywords appear in your text.  Keywords should appear naturally in your test as they would in every day language.  If we were having a conversation about lamps, you wouldn’t expect me to say “lamps what is lamp the best lamp for lamp reading lamp?”  We call this stuffing and it’s a no, no.

But how much is enough and how much is too much?  2%, 5%, 20%?  Well, it depends.  That helps, eh?  Some search engines like 2%, some want more.  The best way to handle this is to create multiple pages with varying key word densities – by varying the densities one of the search engine algorithms will match the density and your page will be ranked.

Which naturally leads us to the old “How long should the article be?”  Some say words counts of 250, some say 500 – again there is no magic bullet.  First and foremost, it should be natural.  If you prattle on just to get to a word count of 500, you’ll lose your audience.  As with anything else in SEO, try different approaches and see what works.

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