When it comes to ensuring success on the search engines there are many important ingredients that need to go into the development of your website.

Most people are familiar with ensuring your website is well keyworded, but many do not realise the importance of ‘keyword density‘.

Adding too many keywords can see your website blacklisted for spamming, while not having enough specific keywords may not be strong enough to get you a mention at all.

Often you will notice that the highest ranking websites under most general search terms are the larger directory-based websites, while the smaller individual business websites are often following.

One of the main reasons larger websites outrank sites this way is due to the Keyword Density.

Keyword Density is quite simple to master when you know how it works…
Basically Keyword Density is the density of the priority keywords throughout the entire website. So for instance if you only have a three page website, then to get a high density you would need to use the main priority keywords that you would like to be found in the search engines very heavily throughout those three pages. The problem with this is that if you use the keyword too much you could be blacklisted!

But using the same keywords throughout a website with more pages provides a higher keyword density without overly using those keywords on each page, and the beauty of a larger website is that you can also use additional priority keywords throughout the website as well, so you have a multitude of popular search phrases throughout the website.

Where I live here on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, the main business trade is holiday accommodation. Being a very competitive market it is obviously important to ensure the accommodation websites that make it to the top have the best keyword density.

Having built a large number of Sunshine Coast accommodation websites over the past years, it was always a challenge to ensure they outrank their competitors, but with a good basic knowledge of how to correctly use keywords and keyword density it becomes quite easy once you know the correct technique.

However, there are many Sunshine Coast accommodation websites lately that are integrating the booking systems of other websites into their website’s navigation, which in theory makes it easier for them to accept bookings online. However the negative reaction by the search engines from this is that they are immediately diluting their keyword density of their own website and substituting it with the linked keywords that are found on the other website that is now integrated into their navigation. This means that if the linked website contains unrelated keywords, such as other accommodation locations (for instance, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, etc) then their density for Sunshine Coast accommodation immediately drops greatly, sending them sliding backwards down the search engine rankings ladder. Even worse, if their are replacing their own navigation with links to pages from another website then the results can be catastrophic, as the most important content of most websites, from a search engine’s perspective, is found in the top area of your web pages.

To check your own keyword density of your website I recommend a software package called Web CEO. Web CEO software allows you to review your keyword density yourself (as well as your competitors!) and allows you to change your density live yourself very easily. It will also show you if any websites directly linked into your navigation are damaging your keyword density or search engine listings.
Check out the software online at http://www.webceo.com

Using some basic techniques and knowledge of Keyword Density can get your website to the top spots in the search engines!

For a free Keyword Density report of your own website (or your competitors!) visit http://www.devision.com.au

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design Australia – Developers of the best ranking Sunshine Coast accommodation websites!