If the pictures are relevant to the keywords targeted, then they may increase visibility on sites like Google Image search, however people searching for images are probably not searching for products to buy or services to use. Regardless to this, it does provide increased visibility of your site on the Internet, more specifically through different channels other than just ‘keyword search’ on the regular search interface. Having said that however, search engines are beginning to show images, video, news and other results within ordinary search results, so you may indeed find your site listed by and image located on it, at the top of Google search results. So in this case, yes it can improve your search visibility.

Image Results on Google Search

Pictures also give us another opportunity to add additional keywords to the caption of the images and the image tag that search engines read to understand what the images is about. This can increase the keyword density on the page, resulting in a search engine ranking the page higher as a result, if performed correctly.

Images, as well as other forms of media such as video and news items all help to increase search engine visibility and ranking as more and more people use services such as YouTube and social media sites to find information on the web.

It may be very well and good to have plenty of informative content on your website but if your website pages do not include the correct keywords, that which potential visitors are typing into search engines, then what are the chances that search engines will rank you highly for keyword phrases that generate a load of traffic? The answer is zilch, zero, nichts. Visit our article “What are Keywords All About” to learn more about keyword selection.

To target the correct keyword phrases we need to collect an extensive amount of data to find out several things.

The most important is keywords or keyword phrases which generate a high amount of traffic. For these are the most valuable keywords to your website that will bring in the most traffic.

As well as this however, we need to be sure that of those keywords and keyword phrases with high traffic, that we select keywords which are more likely to convert into customers. It may be well and good to have thousands of visitors flowing through your site, but if they are not converting into paying customers, then there is little point.

The third step is to filter these keywords to select those which can be inserted into your website best in order to keep the content flowing and natural to read. The last thing we want is to create content that does not make sense to your visitors due to over-optimization of website content.

Since there are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords and keyword phrases that visitors are typing into search engines, this can often be a very tedious process which demands much concentration and effort.

After we have found the best keywords and keyword phrases for your site we need to look at keyword insertion and keyword density. Keyword density is an extremely important step, as the incorrect keyword density may result in a spam filter being flagged on your site from search engines, meaning that you may actually decrease your website ranking rather than increase it. Find out more about keyword density in our previous article “Is Keyword Density Important?“.

Another important step is to analyze your competitors. We will look at whether or not they have employed content optimization (or search engine optimization) and analyze which keywords they are targeting. We will compare their content amount to yours and see where you can improve over their shortcomings. After all they may be ranked above you in search engines – we want it the other way around.

Hopefully, from this article, you have learned the importance of content optimization and some of the steps which take place to get the best results. There is a great amount of work that needs to go into content optimization if you aim to do it correctly and find those keywords to target that less of your competitors are targeting and which result in just as much or higher visitor numbers and a higher conversion rate to give you a higher Return On Investment.

So the keyword density for the keyword ‘density’ in the paragraph above is the number of times the word ‘density’ appears, which is ‘2′ divided by the number of words in the paragraph, which is ‘70′. So that is ‘2 divided by 70 multiplied by 100′ which equals a keyword density of 2.86%. 

So what should keyword density be? Well that depends on certain aspects, the most common being which search engine you are targeting, followed by where the keyword is located (several areas listed above). Keyword density is most commonly analysed in website content.

Your website needs to be readable by your visitor. It needs to flow so that your visitors can read it. If your keyword density is too high it may be unreadable or it may trigger a spam alert in a search engine which may actually lower your ranking. As a result, the first paragraph may look like this:

Keyword Density refers to the density of a keyword. Keyword density is used in SEO. Keyword density measures the percentage of keywords (density) in relation to the content on the page. Keyword density may also be analysed in the URL. Anchor text and inbound links also require keyword density analysis. The keyword density formula is ‘keyword appearances (density) / total keywords x 100′.

So, lets check the keyword density for the keyword ‘density’ in the paragraph above. The number of times the word density appears is ‘9′ divided by the number of words in the paragraph, which is ‘62′. So that is ‘9 divided by 62 multiplied by 100′ which equals a keyword density of 14.52%. This is a great improvement over the first paragraph, but the downside is that it is difficult to read, the keyword density is high enough to trigger a spam alert in a search engine and you may loose visitors as they would rather read someone else’s article which makes more sense.

Therefore it is also important to target only a few keywords per page. For example if you are selling books (this is a nice topic), then you would target the keyword ‘dean koontz’ to the page which lists books written by Dean Koontz. Likewise, you would target the keyword phrase ‘deepak chopra’ to the page which lists books by Deepak Chopra for sale. And so on. Ultimately it is best to target only one to two keyword phrases to one page of your website. And that targeted keyword phrase should have the highest density on that page. However, as mentioned above that does not mean that a high keyword density is good. It must be low enough so as not to trigger a spam alert.

Some websites may come into problems here. An example would be a shopping cart page which lists only the title of the book along with the Author and the price of the book. If we go back to our Dean Koontz example, lets list a selection of books:

• Dean Koontz, The Face, $19.95
• Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy, $19.95
• Dean Koontz, The Taking, $19.95
• Dean Koontz, Velocity, $19.95
• Dean Koontz, The Husband, $19.95
• Dean Koontz, The Good Guy, $19.95

The main problem here is that Dean Koontz has very short titles of the books he writes, often consisting of only one or two keywords. The keyword density of the keyword phrase ‘Dean Koontz’ in the list above is ‘(6 x 2)/30 x 100′ which comes to 40%. Note that we have multiplied the number of appearances of ‘dean koontz’ by two as this keyword phrase consists of two keywords. A keyword density of 40% is a spam alert waiting to happen.

The fact is that issues such as this affect many websites without them even trying to rank highly. This is very unfortunate for some websites where spammy tactics are used without knowledge of them even existing. Therefore, being aware of Search Engine Optimization and implementing it from website build is very important and should therefore be added into the cost of a website. Unfortunately this is often not the case due to additional expenses and, as a result, Search Engine Optimization often involves repairing errors made in the past to conform with search engine algorithms (the formula used by a search engine to determine the ranking of a website). You can see from this, also, that as search engine algorithms change, so too must SEO strategies, to conform with new search engine standards. This means that SEO is not simply a one time fix. Just as when Microsoft release a new version of Windows to make it more powerful and feature rich, you may also need to upgrade your hardware (or buy a new computer) so that you can use this new software.

So, Yes, keyword density is highly important. It is the difference between 1st position and last.

See more factors that affect Search Engine Optimization on our website.