PHPBUILT's Idiot-Proof Guide to Authority Site Building

phpbuilt You were saying on a 3 keyword combo you should keep your keyword density under 1%, 2 words under 1.5% and 1 word under 2%. Does that mean if I have a post that targets the keyword "best green widgets" I should keep this under 1%, keep combinations of "best green" and "green widgets" under 1.5% and any single words of "best" "green" and "widgets" under 2% that appear on that particular post?

Also do you consider the keyword " Cats and dogs" as a 3 keyword phase or 2 as it has a stop word in it?

I'm quite confused by this. I've de-optimized over 5 websites and none of them have shown any positive movement. Yesterday night, I de-optimized my 6th website and the main keyword jumped from #29 to #6 for a 27k+ search term. I basically took the keyword off from the entire page except for the title.

I guess it's time to shift my focus more on getting quality content.

I have eave noticed this as well. In the niches I follow, the keyword density of the top pages vary a lot. Some rank with a density less than .5% and other keywords/niches rank at 4 to 5%. Some pages rank without the keyword on the page at all.

Also, some pages rank with the keyword on multiple H1, H2 and H3 tags. Google is so random with this shit these days...

PHP - what's your take on this?

FuryKyle said:

I've got to disagree with your keyword density concept. Whilst 1-2% is fine in most cases, a better onpage SEO would have the figure at 4% as a minimum. Major sites ranking for BIG keywords (take wikipedia for example) has their main term at 5% on average, some even going up to 7 and they rank just fine. Most of the top 10 sites in fact have their KW density way up than 2%.

I've also done split testing before for two sites with similar competition. One with 2% and one with 6% and they made absolutely no difference at all SEOwise under identical conditions. I ran two same campaigns to each of the site and I did not notice any significant advantage of having a 2% density.

Also, if you're writing about, say, dog training, dropping the keyword density below 2% is extremely unnatural. Well written articles would have the density naturally around the 4-5% range - aka articles written with no "KW density, LSI" and all those fluff in mind. If you were to search for the term "dog training" and you don't see the word mentioned a lot on that page, would you think that you're on the right page? Even using interchangeable words like "it" or phrasing the term differently would have a subconscious effect on the reader, no?

Just my 2 cents.

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PHP you advise to remove the author link on each page. In the All in one seo plugin there is an option to no index the author archives....if i enable this option is this sufficient to address this issue?

To tell you the truth guys, some of my client's sites which are in high competition niches got an extreme boost simply by completely removing the keyword phrase (if it is longer than 3-4 words) from the article body. The only place where I've left them is the title.

jurky said:

To tell you the truth guys, some of my client's sites which are in high competition niches got an extreme boost simply by completely removing the keyword phrase (if it is longer than 3-4 words) from the article body. The only place where I've left them is the title.

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I seem to be seeing something similar. If I have a keyword like "best red widget for summer". I place the exact phrase only in the title, and then I optimize the article for both "best red widget" and "widget for summer." or something along those lines. I don't mention the exact phrase in my article if it's a really long keyword.

What's your take on this OP?

crazedspyker said:

I'm quite confused by this. I've de-optimized over 5 websites and none of them have shown any positive movement. Yesterday night, I de-optimized my 6th website and the main keyword jumped from #29 to #6 for a 27k+ search term. I basically took the keyword off from the entire page except for the title.

I guess it's time to shift my focus more on getting quality content.

Click to expand...

Did you compare keyword density on your site and competitors sites?

There should be some correlation.

@5% keyword density.

There's 1001 reasons a site ranks. On the wikipedia example, they have 90DA 87PA PR9 with over 2 mil links in, they rank for anything they want with any keyword density they want, so that's a bad example.

In a competitive niche, links are the name of the game. Everyone has a backlink portfolo that resembles a super-charged rocket strapped onto their vehicle. With the on-page SEO, its the difference between that vehicle being a yugo or a porche. You can go pretty fast in a yugo with a rocket attached to it, but it might not be easy to manuver.

I've played the same game everyone else does. I've run the same software to get the same crappy links, and I know short term it works very well. You might even be able to float a 5% density page indefinitely if you have great inbound links on a continual bases ... but its not the most optimal way of doing it.

Very exact keyword densities, as explained in this thread, are the best practice when it comes to Google's filters. I spend a good portion of my workweek taking penalized client websites and geting them ranking once again. My toolkit to removing penalties is 100% underoptimization, from lowering keyword densities, switching inner-website-linking to non-exact anchors and diluting incoming links. The sites I tweak are highly competitive and chase up to 1 mil exacts.

The only reason someone needs bothering even reading this thread is if their site can't be found for their desired keywords in the top 1000. That, without a doubt, means you're overoptimized -- and this thread explains how to get out of that penalty. If you're ranking just fine at 5% density and you're happy, by all means continue what you're doing -- your site must have some quality about it (such as age, PA/DA/PR, great content, etc.) that allows it to bypass my notion that a 5% page is penalized.

A brand new site with no incoming links isn't getting away with 5% density though. IMO, isolating that truth is the way to understand how Google treats content ... because certainly if they treat new sites that way, they treat content on older, more established sites that way (even though those older, more established sites can get away with lower quality) it would probably be better for them if they had higher quality content.

crazedspyker said:

I'm quite confused by this. I've de-optimized over 5 websites and none of them have shown any positive movement. Yesterday night, I de-optimized my 6th website and the main keyword jumped from #29 to #6 for a 27k+ search term. I basically took the keyword off from the entire page except for the title.

I guess it's time to shift my focus more on getting quality content.

Click to expand...

SEOing homepage or inner pages? Did you backlink, if so whats a breakdown of the achors you used?

Regarding the ranking for 27k term and taking keyword off entire page ... that sounds like you have a lot of anchors with exact matchs, in which case its a good idea to reduce the keyword as you did.

If you want, PM me an example site I'll take a look at it.

jurky said:

To tell you the truth guys, some of my client's sites which are in high competition niches got an extreme boost simply by completely removing the keyword phrase (if it is longer than 3-4 words) from the article body. The only place where I've left them is the title.

Click to expand...

If you're shooting for a 3 or 4 keyword combo, using the entire phrase next to each other is very optimized. Breaking the keyword up gives you partial optimization for the full keyword, which in fact could get you hitting the sweet spot whereas using the exact term can be too optimized. That's not always the case where you'd be penalized like that, however, but its something I'd consider doing if you've used exact anchors on that 3 or 4 word keyword too much and believe you're penalized.

Eagle Eye said:

PHP you advise to remove the author link on each page. In the All in one seo plugin there is an option to no index the author archives....if i enable this option is this sufficient to address this issue?

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If you noindex, the question is -- what does Google do with a noindex?

One thing I know it does is prevent one type of page from cannibilizing another in the SERPs, meaning they won't be competing with each other.

Beyond that its pure guesswork what Google does with it ...

Does it consider that content duplicate, even though its not showing? Duplicate (low quality) content on one part of a site can drag the whole site down.

Does Google consider that page as soaking up PR that would otherwise flow freely through your site? If so, you're bleeding pagerank.

Now when I suggest you noindex categories, categories actually have a purpose. It organizes pages and I believe that every page in that category gets a boost relevant to the keyword of that category. The pagerank and other optimizations that category page is receiving is passing the benefit of relevancy to the pages in that category.

However, what kind of "boost" is author page giving? That every article is attributed to that author? When 99% of the time, there's only 1 author on a website? That is a completely worthless optimization that the author page is serving. Especially when you should be attributing the author using Google+, thus the author page is irrelevant.

Pauli66 said:

phpbuilt You were saying on a 3 keyword combo you should keep your keyword density under 1%, 2 words under 1.5% and 1 word under 2%. Does that mean if I have a post that targets the keyword "best green widgets" I should keep this under 1%, keep combinations of "best green" and "green widgets" under 1.5% and any single words of "best" "green" and "widgets" under 2% that appear on that particular post?

Also do you consider the keyword " Cats and dogs" as a 3 keyword phase or 2 as it has a stop word in it?

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A 3 word combo on 100 words is approximately 3.3% density. You'll have to write 300 words before you hit 1%. Assume that you write a 600 word article, you reference the 3 word combo twice ... that puts you at 1%.

However, what you really want to rank for is "green widgets", thats your goal. I can't imagine a scenario where "best ___ ___" has a higher search volume than just "___ ___", whatever keyword you're dealing with.

Therefore, if you're using "best green widgets" as a crutch to rank for something while you actually try to rank for "green widgets" ... first you hit the "best green widgets" density by using it twice in a 600 word article (puts you at 1% ... both are fine).

Densities work different on a 2 word combo though. On 600 words, each use of a 2 word combo is around .33%. Now, you've already mentioned the 2 word combo twice with the 3 word combo ... so your article is already at .66% density. You should feel free to take that density up to 1.5%, which means another 2 mentions of "green widgets" (which puts you at 1.3% density), preferably separated by stop words with no adjectives or modifiers attached to it.

Individual word use ... no single word should ever exceed 2%.

Now, if you're like a typical SEO, you're going to want to hit that page with exact match anchors on links more than you probably should be doing. If you think you're going to push it on exact match anchors, chop all densities above in half.

I just noticed some sports sites I visit got rid of their tags; when they did I'm not sure, but they was using tags less then a year ago.

phpbuilt said:

SEOing homepage or inner pages? Did you backlink, if so whats a breakdown of the achors you used?

Regarding the ranking for 27k term and taking keyword off entire page ... that sounds like you have a lot of anchors with exact matchs, in which case its a good idea to reduce the keyword as you did.

If you want, PM me an example site I'll take a look at it.

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Yeah the 27k website had 50% keyword anchor text.

I'm going to send you a pm with one of the sites that I de-optimized but haven't seen any movement.

I don't quite agree with quality article rank, my competitor use shitty article and rank.. I think authority > article quality, so I guess the bigger picture when starting a site isn't buying high quality articles.. am I right?

Great stuff...Thanks for sharing.
I'll surely follow it

Thank you phpbuilt for this vey informative guide. I have read all posts and try to act and see results.

I have this problem and hope you can solve it:

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I target 2 keywords :
- KW A ---> Homepage ( 3 words - about 1k links and many social signals/exact anchor less than 2% )
- KW B ---> Post ( 4 words - no links, just few social signals ).

The problem is the Post is ranked #8 for KW A, the post is not optimized at all for KW A,
while the Homepage ranked #11 for KW B. Homepage is not optimized at all for KW B.

I followed your guide and learned a lot, removed tags, author page, rename categories and reduce keyword density using :
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
I used show +5% for KW A in homepage, and now 1.05 in all page, 1,03 in body, 1.86 in heading, no links, no images.
I am not sure if the dentist is ok now or not since I never looked deeply at density thing.

Used you recommended addon for firefox :


Now, I am not sure what is my correct density ? Should I reduce the density in titles... etc
I know its stupid question, but really never know the theme can inflate the keyword density.

I read your previous answers on this subject, but still need more explaining

==========================================================

My second question is interlinking :
How to do them the best way ?
Should I use exact anchored from each post ?
Should I put an interlink in each post targeting my main Page?

currently, I am using a plugin to auto add related links at the bottom of the content.

==========================================================

cgpa2.17 said:

I don't quite agree with quality article rank, my competitor use shitty article and rank.. I think authority > article quality, so I guess the bigger picture when starting a site isn't buying high quality articles.. am I right?

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So you just said authority is better than article quality, and you are correct. For this reason, people go out and buy aged domains, so they can have a lower quality (according to Google's filter) and still rank.

My point is -- if you have a better article quality, you can rank. That person ranking better than you with a crappy article would be much higher than they currently are if they had written their article properly.

I noticed just now, a 9% keyword density on an 800k exact highly competitive keyword I'm competing against. Certainly they're spamming the page into oblivion. It works. I also know they won't be there a couple weeks from now.

This is a method to rank articles from top 10 to top 30 without backlinks, and once they've settled you increase them with minimal quality backlinking. That's a better strategy for long term rankings.

kunu56 said:

I target 2 keywords :
- KW A ---> Homepage ( 3 words - about 1k links and many social signals/exact anchor less than 2% )
- KW B ---> Post ( 4 words - no links, just few social signals ).

The problem is the Post is ranked #8 for KW A, the post is not optimized at all for KW A,
while the Homepage ranked #11 for KW B. Homepage is not optimized at all for KW B.

I followed your guide and learned a lot, removed tags, author page, rename categories and reduce keyword density using :
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
I used show +5% for KW A in homepage, and now 1.05 in all page, 1,03 in body, 1.86 in heading, no links, no images.
I am not sure if the dentist is ok now or not since I never looked deeply at density thing.

Used you recommended addon for firefox :
View attachment 43499

Now, I am not sure what is my correct density ? Should I reduce the density in titles... etc
I know its stupid question, but really never know the theme can inflate the keyword density.

I read your previous answers on this subject, but still need more explaining

Click to expand...

Density of around 1% on 3 to 4 keyword combos, 2% on a 3 keyword combo still sounds high. Your included image looks fine though. I just go by the density according to Quirk Searchstatus.

You should know within 36 hours whether your change fixed anything.

kunu56 said:

My second question is interlinking :
How to do them the best way ?
Should I use exact anchored from each post ?
Should I put an interlink in each post targeting my main Page?

currently, I am using a plugin to auto add related links at the bottom of the content.

Click to expand...

Your plugin will probably be fine, restrict it to the name of the post only (no excerpt) and only 4 listings ... if you go more than that it will start to inject too many keywords.

Interlink between your articles at around 20% exact anchor, 40% related keyword but not exact, and 40% "click here" sort of stuff, but change that up very often, different anchor each time. I'd recommend that both on-site and off-site incoming anchor texts.

This is the absolute bollocks and exactly what I need right now.

Thankyou good Sir!