After having a conversation this morning with one of Kutenda’s super-geeks about all the various and sundry things that effect search rankings on a search page, I realize how relatively unhelpful it is to the average person managing a website to offer stats about keyword density. Typically, these stats show the following:

1. what your top 3 keywords are
2. how many searches there are per month for that keyword
3. your ranks for that keyword

The problem with this data for most website owners is that it isn’t very useful. Typically, one of those top 3 keywords on a company web page are the company name, so unless you have really high brand recognition, that’s not too compelling for probably 80% of the websites out there. Chances are, there aren’t many searches out there for your company name, unless you’re a well-known brand in your category or local area.

The next problem with this data is that frankly, you could have great page keyword density, but it could be for not a very compelling word or phrase, as far as what people search on to find a company like yours. Here’s an example of a chiropractor in Golden, Colorado whose highest density is around the word wellness:

Is wellness the best choice for keyword density?

If I were optimizing this site, I’d want Golden, Colorado to be a pretty prominent keyword. I can’t even see it on here at all. Clearly you cannot uncover how keywords are weighted using Wordle, but I think its a great visual tool for people who don’t spend all their days looking at search engine optimization info (ie, the rest of us).

Since content is a major component in search ranking, getting a good visual representation of keyword density can help you figure out where to focus new or updated content on a page. Hoping to do better for a particular keyword or phrase? Create a Wordle and find out where your page density is (or, if your site has an RSS feed, dump that URL into Wordle to get a better representation of keyword density across your site).

For grins, I took three players in the social media monitoring/analytics to task on their home pages, to see their keyword density. The players: Collective Intellect (my former employer), Radian6 and Visible Technologies:

Collective Intellect home page keyword density

Radian6 home page keyword density

Visible Tech home page keyword density

From this experiment alone, I’d say Radian6 is doing the best job of keyword density on the terms that matter most to them.

Interestingly, of all the searches I did on Google for where I’d think any of these folks might show up — social media measurement, social media analytics, and social media monitoring – none showed up on the first page of search engine results. Who did? Just for social media monitoring – Trackur and Techrigy. There’s just a lot of other fresh content in this space, so kudos to Andy Beal and the folks at Techrigy for their SEO skills in beating out blog posts and articles to get on the first page of Google search results.

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