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Avatar Went Hot: February 4, 2008 - 8:25 am
Posted By: mpilatow 152 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginepeople.com)
Category: SEO
Keyword density says something about words in a document in relation to the document itself. It doesn’t help you to compare and thus sort or rank a set of documents.
14 Comments     

Comments

from Ruud 152 days ago #
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Keyword density seems intuitively real. It just seems to make sense. Getting over that bump of seeming reality, really understanding that KD is pure nonsense has been (don't laugh!) one of the hardest things I learned in SEO.

"Getting it" is, I think, a real win.

Thanks for the sphinn, Mark!

from PotPieGirl 152 days ago #
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Ruud,

That is a wonderful article - and one that needs to be shared!  You presented this in a clear and consise way that made sense of the nonsense  =)

from bwelford 151 days ago #
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Great article, Ruud.  .. and of course Latent Semantic Analysis and Long Tail Searches make it all even less relevant, even if it had ever been in recent years.

from SpostareDuro 150 days ago #
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Ruud: I Just received this message in SU "EXCELLENT link to "How Search Really Works: The Keyword Density Myth." Im sure Ill spend a considerable amount of time with it. Have a great day and thank you!"

Just thought you should know that there are more than Ruud lovers that got alot out of this post. (smile)

from theGypsy 150 days ago #
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aaawwww... jeez Welford my friend... please avoid the LSI BandWagon  would ya? That one just gets me going. Certainly methodologies relating to phrase based and other semantic models are worth looking at, I just don't want to go down the road of assumptions that is Latent Semantic Analysis and search engines.

from Ruud 150 days ago #
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LSI is unlikely to be directly used by Google et al to return organic results. It would be a trustworthy tool for advertising (Adwords) or for determing commercial intent (MS labs).

Keyword density is not just "less relevant": it's never been relevant.

@PotPieGirl, happy you like it.

@SpostareDuro -- aww, shucks you make me feel all good about myself :)

@theGypsy that's a nice rant. I hope to touch upon the subject in this series.

from theGypsy 150 days ago #
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@ Ruud - I was going to comment on yer post when I read it but that was the wee hours of this morning and was bagged. I was recently also talking about the death of KW Density in a guest post for VanGogh (Steven) a while back; Phrase Based Optimization; A second look 

...and have older stuff as well as a TON on semantic related concepts and phrase based optimization. Feel free to hook up any time to chat that goodiness, it's a small crowd that can actualy stay awake with those convos

from Halfdeck 150 days ago #
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theGypsy, according to a recent Vanessa Fox interview, Google isn't that smart.

http://www.reachd.com/ViewBlog/87/

This is actually an example I used for years, which is that you might have a paid that has houses for sale, in the text, but may be no one is actually searching for houses for sale, maybe they are searching for homes for sale or real estate or they are searching for some other thing that is not exactly there. I think people who are new to the search space, think the search engines are little smarter than actually are and think that they can make those connections or someone searching for houses for sale and I have a site on real estates that's going to be a connection there and the truth is that it does not actually happen at all that way. So, definitely look through some more search word and then put those terms on your page, the title tag, the heading tag the meta-description and then somewhere in the content, do not spam it, but just make sure that those words appear. That is actually probably the number one easy thing that does like makes a lot of difference. So that would be the first thing I would say to do.

from theGypsy 150 days ago #
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@ HD - while I am not a rider on the LSI BandWagon, I also don't buy that they are altogether brain dead. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that shows some interest in semantic phrase relationships and probabilistic matricies. The main thing for me is that the purchase of Applied Semantics spawned a sub-culture of 'LSI Mythology' in some SEO circles - which is a bit of a leap IMO.

from Ruud 150 days ago #
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They're not braindead but LSI "in the wild" has some major drawbacks. In a commercial environment (with manipulated language) LSI is more likely to show Latent Commercial Intent (tongue in cheek) than semantic intent.

Nice link, good video, Halfdeck. Thanks!

from graywolf 150 days ago #
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Of course KWD matters it doesn't matter more than trust, and links/anchor text but of course it matters.

now of course  every time I post an example some engineer comes along and kills it, even though it was working fine for months or years before.

from hugoguzman 150 days ago #
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Great post, Ruud! It's truly amazing how many SEO professionals still cling to the idea of "keyword density".

This isn't the first time that a reputable source has shot it down, but it's good to see a fresh treatment of the topic.

from hugoguzman 150 days ago #
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@graywolf - it doesn't matter. For every example you pull up, there will be mutliple examples that go the other way.

A key note here is this: there's a difference between "keyword density" and having at least one occurence of a given phrase within the copy. Multiple occurences on a document are no more valuable than the first occurance, but if there's not even one occurence, then you have a big problem (regardless of what is contained in your meta info)

from graywolf 149 days ago #
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you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink ...


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