Tue Dec 25 18:03:15 PST 2018

101
You have to be able to evaluate how competitive your market is, what resources
you have available, and whether you can compete in that market. A large reason
many websites fail is that they are too broad or unfocused. If the top sites in your
industry are Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotels.com, and other well-known
properties, you need to have a large budget, create something fundamentally
innovative, or look for a better niche opportunity in which you can dominate.
WebmasterWorld has a useful theming thread here
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum34/68.htm
Keyword Density (KD

Keyword density analyzers end up focusing people on something that is not
important. This causes some people to write content that looks like a robot wrote
it. That type of content will not inspire people to link to it and will not convert
well.
In March of 2005, Dr. Garcia, an information retrieval scientist, wrote an article
about keyword density. His conclusion was ?this overall ratio [keyword density]
tells us nothing about:
? the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity
;
? where in a document the terms occur (distribution
;
? the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence
;
? or the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues
of the
documents.
Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics, and relevancy.?
Later on I will discuss how to structure page content, but it is important to know
that exact keyword density is not an important or useful measure of quality.
Why Focusing on Keyword Density is a Waste of Time
About half of all search queries are unique. Many of the searches that bring visitors
to your sites are for keyword phrases you never would have guessed. If a site is not
well-established, most search traffic will be for long, multiword search phrases.
When webmasters start thinking about keyword density, many of them tend to
remove descriptive modifiers and other semantically-related terms. Since some of
those terms will no longer appear on the page, the ?optimized? site no longer ranks
well for many queries.
People write, search, and use language in similar ways. Thus, if you write naturally,
you are going to be far better optimized for long-tail searches than some person
who wastes time on keyword density will be.
If the content sounds like it was designed for engines instead of people, then less
people are going to want to read it or link to it.