18 replies to this topic

[jmorris]

Hi everyone !
I am very new at this and wanted to know if any of you could shed some light on the topic and give me your feedback? I apologize for such a long post. However , your time and any information that you can provide is appreciated. If this is posted in the wrong forum dept - please accept my apology.

Have any of you heard of James Martell? He has something like 90 + sites and 30,000 pages of content. I understand that he is doing extremely well on a monthly basis - something like a six figure monthly income. When he began he used the keyword formula where you placed your keyword in your headline with your primary keyword appearing first, twice in the first paragraph with the primary appearing first, once in each subsequent paragraph with primary appearing first and once in a sub headline or second headline with the primary keyword appearing first. You then randomly include Tier 2 secondary keywords through out the text in no particular density, but added only as they would naturally appear editorially.

He has now updated his formula to the one below. This new formula he says is doing extremely well for him. He says it is now based on Google Stemming.

Primary Keyword is to be used in the Headline , Once in the first paragraph , and nowhere else on the page.

Tier 1 Secondary keyword is to be used once in the first or second paragraph and nowhere else on the page.

Use keyword Variations - These are individual words that are based on your Primary and Secondary keywords. They should be used repeatedly in the following density.

300 word article - The sum of the individual words and their variations should range between no less than 24 words 8% and no more than 36 words 12%

600 word article - The sum of the individual words and their variations should range between no less than 48 words 8% and no more than 72 words

1000 word article - The sum of the individual words and their variations should range between no less than 72 words 8% and no more than 108 words.

Article example ,
Primary Keyword - Cell Phone Comparisons

Tier 1 Secondary Keyword - Cell Phone Comparison no 's

Variations - Cell , Phone , Comparisons , Comparison , Cellular , Phones , Phone , Telephone, Compare , Comparing ,

Tier 2 Secondary Keyword - Plans , Calling Plans , Family Plans, Rates , Camera , Digital , Mobile , PDA , Handset , GPS Satellite , Global Positioning System , Coverage Area , Customer Service , Nokia , Motorola , NEC , Audiovox , and many many more.

These Tier 2 Secondary keywords would only be added randomly through out the text in no particular density , but added only as they would naturally appear editorially.


Can you SEO experts out there give me your feedback on this? I understand that Google is now using the Stemming Technology. However , how do I know this is not keyword spamming and would at some time be picked up by Google? I also understand this formula really only works with Google and not engines and directories such as MSN , and Yahoo. Will MSN and Yahoo be using this same technology in the near future?

Have any of you followed steps provided by James Martell and built successful web sites using his techniques? If so , what would you suggest to someone that is new and just starting out?
Should I use this new formula or should I use the one he began with? Or do you have another formula that you have and works quite well?

I greatly appreciate any information that any of you can provide. This would include comments , suggestions, feedback of any kind. I look very forward to your replies. I would also like to add that myself and many others new at this greatly appreciate such a great place as this forum.

Thank you ,
Jason

[sweepthelegnate]

my advice would be to know your target audience and write copy that appeals to that audience. Write your copy naturally for your visitors and you'll find that you naturally use your keywords. Writing for any type of algorithm is a bad long-term strategy because they algorithm is going to change.

[randfish]

Jason,

If there is a 'formula' for on-page keyword optimization, it should have nothing to do with keyword density as modern search engines all use term weight as the calculation system for page relevance to a particular word or phrase.

Term weight is a much cleaner and more logical methodology, and has been around for some time. I have heard that search engines only measure density to analyze for spam - which seems likely to me.

If you want the term weight formula, there's a few threads and posts that can help:

- http://forums.seocha...m/t22356/s.html
- http://forums.search...hread.php?t=489
- http://www.socengine...etail.php?ID=40

Best of luck!

[loki]

90+ sites? what's his area?

[Jill]

Please read our pinned thread in the copywriting section on Keyword Density.

[juliesjewels]

Jason,

I've never heard of the person you mention in your post but I can say I'd hate to have to work under all of those rules (i.e. 300 word article 8-12%, 600 word article 8% keywords). Think about the time wasted in trying to count the words, follow the rules, and focus strictly on certain keywords and the variations of those words. Nathan's post hit the nail on the head. Create each page for human visitors, accurately describe your products/content, and spend all your time trying to create the best site possible for human visitors. If you do this the traffic AND conversions will improve by leaps and bounds.

[jmorris]

Hi Nathan ,
Thanks so much for the reply. It is greatly appreciated.

[Edited to remove long quote.]

Edited by Randy, 25 February 2005 - 12:24 PM.

[jmorris]

Hi Julie !
Thanks for the reply. It is greatly appreciated. Also , I took a look at your web site and I must say that you have done a great job on design etc. I have a question. How do you add content to your site? Do you just write from the heart and not focus at all on the SEO side such as keyword density etc? What kind rankings are you getting as well as monthly traffic. Any further information that you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks ,
Jason

Jason,

I've never heard of the person you mention in your post but I can say I'd hate to have to work under all of those rules (i.e. 300 word article 8-12%, 600 word article 8% keywords).  Think about the time wasted in trying to count the words, follow the rules, and focus strictly on certain keywords and the variations of those words.  Nathan's post hit the nail on the head.  Create each page for human visitors, accurately describe your products/content, and spend all your time trying to create the best site possible for human visitors.  If you do this the traffic AND conversions will improve by leaps and bounds. 

[jmorris]

Hi Jill !
Thank you also for your reply. It is greatly appreciated. I am going to tear into the threads on copywriting that you have suggested. I see that you have great experience in SEO. Do you also just write from the heart and not focus on any formula?

Is it true that you actually get top rankings from incoming links rather than how you use your keywords through out your text?

Any further information that you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks ,
Jason

Please read our pinned thread in the copywriting section on Keyword Density.

[torka]

Is it true that you actually get top rankings from incoming links rather than how you use your keywords through out your text?

Hi, Jason!

On Google, as of the moment, I'd say yes. It's called "Google-bombing". But it takes a lot of links.

Frankly, on Google, you probably can't get to #1 on keywords alone. Maybe not on Yahoo or MSN, either, although they do give more weight to on-page text than Google does.

Generally speaking, to get and maintain top rankings on the major SEs requires both well-written copy and strong inbound links, plus good page design, site navigation and linking structure. It's the combination of everything working together that leads to long-term ranking success.

(And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that rankings without conversions are useless. It doesn't do you any good to get a #1 ranking and tons of incoming traffic if visitors bail out before making it through your site to the point of taking you up on whatever it is you have to offer. Which is why so many people here say to write with your human visitors first in mind. )

--Torka

[torka]

I should add that there is such a thing as SEO copywriting. There are techniques that are used to work key phrases naturally into the copy so that it reads well to the human visitor -- so that it "flows" -- but so that it also reads well to the SE spider. It's draws heavily from traditional copywriting techniques, but isn't the same as "straight" copywriting.

It's a far cry from simply "writing from the heart". But it's also nowhere near as rules-based and formulaic as the advice posted up at the top of this thread.

MHO, SEO copywriting is an art, not a science. And like any art, it requires a certain amount of innate talent, developed by practice until it becomes a skill.

--Torka

[juliesjewels]

Hi Jason,

Torka is right when she says SEO copywriting is a far cry from simply "writing from the heart". I'm not a SEO copywriter and can't afford one so I'm just trying to write from the heart and make the best of it.

When I read your original post I decided to respond because I got the feeling you were looking for a way to improve traffic and might be using the keyword density formula/rules in your post. I'm not a "rules" kind of person. And, after discovering Jill and the others here at HR I have honestly seen the light. I've purchaed and read Karon Thackston's Step-By-Step Copywriting Course, Jill's Nitty-Gritty manual, Steve Krug's book on website usability, and read the posts of every single moderator at HR and their rock solid advice of writing for my human visitors has helped me tremendously.

I've got 6,000 products in 300 different categories. Only 10.9% of my visitors enter my site through the home page. The other 89% enter my site through hundreds of keywords found on my product and/or category pages. The average time a visitor stays on my site and pages viewed per visit has increased considerably since I've started to focus on "writing for my customers from the heart". I can honestly say there's only a small percentage of keywords that I actually think about/focus on. The vast majority of my visitors find my site using specific keyword phrases. For instance, I really do not focus on getting #1 or optimizing for the term "engagement rings" but rather build my pages to describe individual engagement rings (i.e. 14kt yellow gold, princess cut diamond, antique style engagement ring with genuine baguette diamonds, 3 millimeters wide, 1/2 carat diamond total weight). With wording and descriptions like that I get visitors who know what they're looking for and it's working for me.

Don't misunderstand me..... I've got a "to do" list a mile long with this website. There's lots of website usability issues I need to work on. And, just last week in a thread Scottie & another person helped me realize that I can greatly improve my descriptions and title tags for the vast majority of my products. It is called job security, I think. I've got a long, long way to go.

All I can say with certainty is that writing for my human visitors is working for me. I rarely focus on any specific keyword but rather try to describe my pieces as accurately as possible using terminology related to my products, while being as specific as I can possibly be. My customers like this and my conversion rate has also shown steady improvement over the last 6 to 8 months.

Heck, if I had to write a paragraph or a page and stick to a certain word count while at the same time focus on getting my keyword(s) within an 8 to 12% density for the page I'd probably go nuts! But, the bottom line is go with what works for you. I think this whole industry (SEO/SEM) is an art (not a science) with tons of trial and error involved. Best of luck to you and your ventures.

Julie

[juliesjewels]

What kind rankings are you getting?

I just realized I forgot to answer this question in my last post. I never "officially" check my rankings because I really don't have this concrete keyword list that I optimize for. I look at my webstats each week, look at my sales/revenue, average pages viewed per visit, and average time each visitor spent on my pages and go from there. As long as my webstats look good to me I'm a happy camper!

[sonnyyu]

Please read latest thread in the copywriting section on Keyword Density. My opinion anything before that is a little bit outdated.

[mcanerin]

Here is another thing to keep in mind: Some words are easier to use than others.

Sounds logical, right? But what are the ramifications of that?

Well, for a start, some keyterms lend themselves to frequent use without sounding spammy or unnatural, where other words can make a reader cringe if used more than a couple of times on a page.

Because it this, there isn't an "ideal" keyword density (KWD). It might be fairly natural to have a KWD of 14% for real estate, but you may find that a KWD of 3% might even be hard to hit for "international ramifications of tree frog mating habits". I mean, how many times could you use that naturally on a page?

Additionally, a very short page will tend to have a higher natural KWD than a longer one. A page with a single keyword on it and no other text has a 100% KWD. It's probably not even spam (may say "Enter" for example, or be an HTML slideshow Title page) but it's not likely to been seen as relevant or important.

Additionally, some topics lend themselves to high repetition of keywords, and others not.

For this reason, if you are measuring keyword density, you would be comparing it not to the net as a whole, but to the other sites in your area of interest. In short, don't worry about a KWD percentage for anyone except your competitors.

The problem is, even this isn't a great way to go (though it's better). The reason is that your competitors may have the ranking they have in spite of their KWD.

Think about it. You have 10 sites all competing. Each one is trying to outdo the others. The top site happens to have a KWD of 12%. So what are the others going to do? Raise theirs to 13%, of course. Well, the lead site doesn't want lose rankings, so they raise theirs to 15%, and so on. The irony may be that they were all considered relevant back at the 6% mark and the KWD is not even a major factor now. It might even be hurting them.

This is the problem with using formulas for things like this - it would only work if no one else used the same forumla. If they do, then it spirals out of control.

In my experience, the best way to get rankings that are stable and useful is to approach the issue in a holistic manner. Get the best KWD you can without sacrificing useability or legibility, get the most links you can without joining bad neighbourhoods, add as much content as you can without stealing it from others, and so on.

That way, if someone turns a knob in the bowels of a search engine somewhere, you don't lose your rankings overnight because you were focused on an area they just rolled a new filter out on and thus changed all the rules you used to follow.

To go back to the example that the original poster used, that's a pretty clear formula. If it actually worked (or I believed it did) and I wrote auto content generating software (spam) I could use that formula to generate my content, couldn't I? And what would a search engine think of that? All it would take is one engineer to write a simple filter based on it and all these sites are gone. The process leaves an identifiable footprint that can be easily discovered. A human following the system exactly would be collateral damage in the war against spam.

Forget formulas. Focus on your competition and your visitors. Compete against your competitors and make sure your visitors are happy - everything else is taking your eye off the ball.

If this means using the occasional formula as a guideline, fine, but don't focus on it too much - the system is changing too rapidly for any specific formula to work for any length of time. It would stop working shortly after a bunch of people discovered it worked in the first place and started using it, prompting a search engine to respond in order to protect itself from being manipulated by people more interested in formulas than relevance.

Ian

Edited by mcanerin, 26 February 2005 - 01:08 PM.