The Affiliate Journey

I’ve been tweaking several of my affiliate sites these past couple of weeks. The title and meta tags, as well as reviewing the page content and article keyword density.

I feel that a lot of affiliates don’t put the time into writing great content, we’re concerned with getting as many pages up on the web, building a few links and slapping some offers on them. From there we expect people to show up, click and/or buy.

Unfortunately as the Internet landscape becomes more competitive it just doesn’t work that way. So I’m going to put together a series of posts on writing good affiliate web content for your websites.

This first post is going to be on article keyword density.

I know not a really exciting topic, but one that you should consider if you want to avoid looking like a spammer to the search engines (especially Google).

Let’s get started…

What is the ideal SEO Keyword Density?

You’re going to get conflicting information on this but I say (and so do a lot of other respected SEO’s in the business) an ideal keyword density is 3%-5%.

If you’re someone who focuses on LSI (Latent semantic indexing) and uses synonyms remember that the main keyword you’re focussing on could be part of the synonym so this will count to your over all article keyword density.

Let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about:

You’re writing an article on dog training, and the keyword dog training is the word you’re targeting. You do some research and realize that these keywords appear to be related as far as Google is concerned:

• dog training
• best dog training methods
• train you dog at home

You write your article with 3%-5% keyword density for dog training, how ever you also sprinkle in the keyword best dog training methods along the way. If you haven’t used an SEO keyword density checker then you may have just pushed yourself over the limit for how many times you should have the keyword dog training in your article.

Which leads me to my next point…

Check your SEO Keyword density

Before publishing you should always check the keyword density of your article. Don’t get fanatical about it, but knowing that you fall some where in that 3-5% range is good.

here are two free tools you can use to check your article keyword density.

SEO Chat Keyword Density Tool (My personal favorite)
KeywordDensity.com Tool (allows for comparison and you can enter the keyword you’re checking the denisty of)

Where else should your keyword(s) be going

When we talk about article keyword density we usually just discuss how many times the keyword appears in the article, but for seo keyword density we want to pay attention to where the keyword appears on the page as well.

Title Tags

Your title tag is a very important part of every page you publish. Why? Well it’s the click-able text that appears in most SERPs online.

If you were writing an ad for a PPC campaign you’d take careful time writing that title wouldn’t you?

So why don’t we all do the same for our title tags?

I like to have my main keyword appear once in the title tag if it makes sense. This is a good rule of thumb, and it’s not really taken into consideration for article keyword density but it’s something worth while mentioning while we’re on the topic of web content.

NOTE: You don’t need your keyword in the title tag to rank on the first page of Google. There are numerous sites that are doing it now. You just need the right anchor text and mix of links. How ever for conversion, and click through purposes often having your keyword in the title tag is a smart decision.

H1 Tags

Always have your main keyword in your H1 title tag on the page. Please don’t have it be the only text in your title tag. Work your keyword into a relevant title for your page it’ll improve reader confidence and make your content seem less spammy.

Using your keyword in the H1 tag will count towards your over all article keyword density.

Bolding

Another best practice is to use bolding of your keyword(s) on your pages. Use this sparingly but ensure you’re doing it some places on each page.

I can’t give you an exact number of times to bold, or where to bold, but if you bold items with the idea of benefiting the reader and not the search engines you’ll be alright.

When it comes to trying to calculating the best keyword density you can only go so far to tweak the numbers. Remember web content is ranked for web users and readers. While the search engines might be the medium between you and your visitors in the end it’s your visitors that click on the ads, buy your products and purchase from your affiliate merchants.

It’s important that you pay attention to keyword density, but don’t sacrifice readability in the name of exact SEO keyword density. You’ll drive yourself crazy and probably make less money.