Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
-
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content.
They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it.
Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter.
Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader.
Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates?
Thoughts appreciated.
Thanks Craig
-
Remember some points.
Allow H1 one time in the article.
Allow H2 two time in the article.
Allow H3 three time in the article.
Allow strong tag 3 time in the article. Note use strong tag not bold.
Allow underline tag 3 time in the article.
Allow italic tag 3 time in the article.
Keyword Density 1% in the article.
Always remember that content is king. simply focus on delivering high quality content.
-
That's a great response, thank you, really helpful.
What about making sure the first instance of your keyword is in bold close to the start of the body text?
Again I get mixed views on this.
Thanks
Craig
-
When a user types in a search, Google typically relies on HTML elements to match the content on your site to that specific query. Without optimizing key HTML elements (title, body content, headers etc..), you won't be able to rank, it's as simple as that.
For now, the following diagram should help explain the basics of which elements need keyword research attention:
The "Perfectly" Optimized Page(for the example keyword phrase "chocolate donuts")
Page Title: Chocolate Donuts | Mary's Bakery
Meta Description: Mary's Bakery's chocolate donuts are possibly the mostdelicious, perfectly formed, flawlessly chocolately donuts ever made.
H1 Headline:Chocolate Donuts form Mary's Bakery
Image File name: Body Text________________________
cocolate-donuts.jpg chocolate donuts__ ____________________________________ donuts ____________________________________ ____________________________________ chocolate donuts ____________________________________ __________________________________________________________ donuts____ __________________________________________________________ chocolate__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ chocolate donuts________________ __________________________________________________________ _____________________________chocolate __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ ________________________chocolate donuts __________________________________________________________ Page URL: http://marysbakery.com/chocolate-donuts Ultimately you want to attract visitors who are going to convert into customers, if you can identify keywords which will lead to more conversions, you are more likely to see a good ROI.
Google in particular is becoming much more advanced at predicting the intent of searchers. For example, if you search for "apple," are you looking for the fruit or the technology company? Through a lot of user testing and machine learning, Google has determined that its users are probably looking for the technology company. Hence Apple's #1 position on Google.
While you do not have much control over this, user intention should be a priority when you are choosing and filtering your keywords. You want to be targeting keywords where the intention is likely to lead to a conversion for your business.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Probably basic, but how to use image Title and Alt Text - and confusing advice from Moz!
I've been doing SEO on my business's site for years and have got good results. I've always used image Titles and Alt Text text. Our blog posts are image-intensive, often with 100-200 pictures (not surprising since we're photographers). For any given blog post, I've tended to have a uniform image Title for each image and then a more specialised Alt Text tag giving a description. A typical image on one of our blog posts would be like this: Image filename: wedding-photography-at-so-and-so-venue-001.jpg .... 002, 003 etc Image Title Attribute: Wedding Photography at So-And-So-Venue by Our-Company-Name - this would be the same for every image in the blog post. Alternative Text: Bride and groom exchanging vows during wedding ceremony at so-and-so-venue - this would be tailed for each image. So my question is - is this right? The Moz help page for image SEO is actually incorrect in one aspect: https://cloudz.click/ugc/10-tips-for-optimizing-your-images-for-search "Alt text (short for “alternative text”) is used to highlight the identity of an image when you hover over it with your mouse cursor. It also shows as text to all users when there are problems rendering the image." This is not the case. Hovering over the image in Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera ALL display the Image Title, NOT Alt Text. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Using CSS to hide anchor text
Hi all, In my website, I would like to use CSS to set the anchor text to "website design service"(my company provides web design service) but show the button text as "website", due to some artistic reasons. Therefore, the anchor text for the link is "website design service" but what users see is "websites". Does this sound spammy to Google? Is it a risky move that might hurt my SEO? Looking for some advises here. Thank you very much. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
My website is not ranking for primary keywords in Google
I need help regarding some SEO strategy that need to be implemented to my website http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 . My website is a leading live chat product, daily it receives around 2000 unique visitors. Initially the website was impacted by manual link penalty, I cleaned up lot of backlinks, the website revoked from the penalty some where around June'14. Most of the secondary and longtail Keywords started ranking in Google, but unfortunately, it do not rank well for the primary keywords like (live chat, live chat software, helpdesk etc). Since I have done lot of onsite changes and even revamped the content but till now I dont find any improvement. I am unable to understand where I have got structed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk
can anyone help me out?0 -
Too many iframes hurts ranking?
I have 6 different iframe blocks (with same content in those iframes) in every page of my website. I know iframe don't be crawled by search engines but, maybe you experts give me some advice? Is that negative for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
Should I remove Meta Keywords tags?
Hi, Do you recommend removing Meta Keywords or is there "nothing to lose" with having them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
When using ALT tags - are spaces, hyphens or underscores preferred by Google when using multiple words?
when plugging ALT tags into images, does Google prefer spaces, hyphens, or underscores? I know with filenames, hyphens or underscores are preferred and spaces are replaced with %20. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrooklynCruiser3