I cannot tell you how many times I have applied for a job that required SEO and when hired, gotten a huge list of "keywords" with rates to stuff them. There are so many keywords that it is ridiculous. This should not be the basis of anyone's advertising plan.
Consider a recent project that I was glad did not continue beyond one article. Now the project description for this particular SEO product was to write an article of 3500 words about the topic. I was given 109 keywords to use 704 times (20% of the total content). Some of these "keywords" were "won," "it's," "often," "new," "find," "them," "how," "day," "two," "2018," "don't," and "make." Now, what was I writing about? You see, your keywords are supposed to be the words someone would use to look for your product on the web. They should be specific to your product. Got a guess?
Here is another hint: I was supposed to use 43 keyword phrases a total of 183 times (making up another 461 words unless I doubled up with some of the "keywords." These contained phrases such as "such as" (I kid you not), "New York," "York City," "e-mail address," and "mild to moderate." Figured it out yet? If I get 10 guesses in the comment section, I will post the answer to what I was writing about there.
So confident am I that these "keywords" are "non-keywords" go ahead and put these into your favorite search engine and see what you come up with. I am sensing another poem along the lines of Chicks Dig War. (For those of you who don't know, this is a poem created when the author, Drew Gardner, typed three seemingly random words into a search engine and the poem documents his results which spawned the flarf genre of literature.)
For this project, I had 1165 words of a 3500 word article randomly chosen for me, and I was supposed to write something interesting and relevant. Don't do this to freelancers who are writing for you, and don't do this to yourself!
A single word or phrase should appear no more than 1-2% of the time in your work. If it appears more than 5% you can get permanently banned from Google (or so the rumor goes). One of the search phrases I on the provided list needed to be used 1.5% of the time or once every 60 words. More importantly, look at the word totals: I was supposed to use a specific keyword or phrase every four words. Yes, some were non-keywords, but that doesn't help the situation much because I still had to make sure they were there.
Google has said repeatedly that after the first couple-few uses of a word, your topic is recognized and now synonyms count toward that. A Forbes writer took this further and discover the top ranked web pages used 0.7-0.9% keyword density. (Note this word is not plural. If you have more than 5 keywords/phrases, you are doing yourself and your writers a disservice.) Ironically, the lower the density the higher the page ranked. Why? Because it is impossible to write something that is interesting and relevant if you stuffed it full of keywords!
Which is what finally brought me to my soapbox. I saw yet another job for SEO today. The poster stated that the article didn't flow nicely. They wanted it to be readable and interesting, but the freelancer was not allowed to change the SEO (read- I have stuffed this article full of keywords to the point it could make anyone throw-up if forced to read it entirely, but I want you to rewrite it so it won't make readers sick without fixing the problem). Amazingly, people actually apply for these jobs all the time and get them. Apparently those commissioning the work have grown so accustomed to the moldy bread they are producing that simply adding a little mayonnaise makes them entirely palatable even though they still make normal people ill.
Now, in an attempt to "stuff" this article have used the word "keyword" 16 times in this
post of 772 words, which is about 2%. Can you image how awful
this article would be if I had used it twice as much?
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