How to write keyword rich body copy

Search engine spiders are looking for pages that are relative to a search phrase, so they like to see keyword phrases repeated within the copy of that page. Pages that are loaded with graphics and low on text make it difficult for the search engine spiders to analyze in a sufficient matter whether or not a site is relevant for a specific keyword phrase. Search engine spiders need to “see” text to make that judgment.

For the reason mentioned above, it is highly recommended that each page contain at the bare minimum 250-300 words of keyword dense copy. (Remember that this copy not only helps your search engine rankings, it also provides your potential customer with plenty of insight into your products and services, thus helping you to convert sales.)

You might be wondering what “keyword dense” copy is. Search engines are not capable of processing words and information like we humans can, so they do the best they can. In order to determine the rank of particular pages, search engine spiders scan through the text on your site and process how often certain keyword phrases come up. The ratio of keyword phrases to the total copy is known as “keyword density.”

To give a better understanding of how keyword rich copy works, let’s look at how a search engine will read the text on a certain page. Let’s say someone has searched for “blue dice.” When a search engine looks at a page to find a match for “blue dice” they are basically seeing the text like this:

text text text blue dice text text text text text text blue dice text text text text text text text text text text text text text blue dice text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

Above, the search engine spiders see three instances of “blue dice” out of 50 words. That’s a decent keyword density and it makes them think that there’s a good chance your page has good information on blue dice.

Now, let’s say that you also wish to optimize that page for yellow shirts.

text text text blue dice text text text yellow shirts text blue dice text text text yellow shirts text text text text text text text text blue dice text text text text text text text yellow shirts text text text text text text text text text text text text text

You will see that now we’ve got yellow shirts showing up three times and blue dice showing up three times in 50 words. That still leaves enough “text” words in there to make the page sound ok and readable, so this will work.

But, if you decide you want to add a third phrase, for example, orange balls…then we get…

orange balls text blue dice text text text yellow shirts text blue dice text text text yellow shirts text text text text text text text text blue dice text text text text orange balls text yellow shirts text text text text text text text text orange balls text text text

Keyword Desnity

As you can see, we are starting to run out of “text” words because we have so many keywords in there. Also, you are now telling the search engine that blue dice, yellow shirts and orange balls are equally important on your web site. Search engines can’t tell which one is more important then another, so it starts to assume that they are all just a little bit important. After all, if one of them was more important than the other, it would show up more often, right? In other words, if you try to fit in more keyword phrases into a page, your keyword density decreases and your optimization efforts are less successful.

Now, you may be asking yourself how a search engine “knows” what words on your page are keywords or keyword phrases. The answer is very simple: they don’t. Search engines have no idea what a orange ball is. They don’t care. They are simply matching up the words that people are typing in as queries. You could optimize your site for “xzxzxz” and if someone searched for that, your page would come up. Basically, every single word on your page could be a keyword; a search engine has no idea. It only knows that word X shows up as 8% of the page content on your page, so it must be important. When a person comes to a search engine and looks for word X, the search engine will remember that your site is about that.

Copywriters should aim for a keyword density of 3-6% for each keyword phrase on a particular page. As tempting as it might be to think that you can’t have too much of a good thing, it is very important to avoid the temptation of “fluffing” your page with excessive keywords to increase your density. The search engines have spent years adjusting their computers to “catch” web sites that try to fool their way into earning high rankings. An unusually high keyword density is most likely to get flagged as a “spammer” and may cause your site to “get fined” some ranking penalties.

A good rule of thumb is to read your page copy out loud. If it sounds like you are forceing the use of your keywords just to fit them in, chances are good that the copy needs some more work.