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Anchor Text vs Keyword Density

By: John Colascione, Fri Jan 27th, 2006 03:57:30 AM

Keyword Density

Keyword density (the amount of times a keyword is found on page) seems to be a thing of the past. In recent years there were many opinions of how keyword density should be incorporated into each websites individual pages. Generally, the opinions always conflicted each other from one professional to the next. Although these opinions did always seem to have one thing in common; they always ranged consistently somewhere between 5 - 15%. Testing for keyword density results went on for years and never finalized anywhere since the search engines seem to all use different algorithms targeting keyword density and changed the characteristics of their requirements often.

Today, keyword density is nowhere near as important as it used to be. I personally have seen many times a site ranking in the top of the search engines for a keyword or keyword phrase not even found on the website. This was obviously because of the heavy number of inbound links to the page with the anchor text in the URL. Let me give you a quick example of this.

Anchor Text vs Keyword Density

A search would be conducted for "computers" and one of the first website results on Google would be the Apple Computers website. Upon inspection, the website never even had the word computers on the homepage. As you see by visiting http://www.apple.com, the site is heavily designed in graphics and there is near no text at all on this page. This was obviously happening because the site had gained so many thousands of inbound links pointing to it similar to this: "Apple Computers", that is ranked very well on Google based on the fact of "Anchor Text" alone.

Anchor text is the actual word in the hyperlink which is believed to count heavily towards ranking a site based on an individual keyword or keyword phrase. It only makes sense that people will link to a site with the most relevant words which describe the location. In this example, many thousands of people would link to the Apple.com website and write "Apple Computers". This created a highly targeted keyword phrase in combination with importance acquired by gaining so many inbound links also counting as pagerank. Because of these factors, the site is easily able to obtain key placement on the Google search engine.

In the past, many site owners would find websites that rank high in the search engines and believe that if they copied their source code or HTML, and replicated what a competitor had done on their site, that they would enjoy premium search engine rankings as well. Some webmasters probably still try this in an attempt to rank their site when they do not understand exactly what is involved.

Don't try to clone pages, tags, or descriptions of other sites that rank high. There are usually unseen reasons like these above which results in why a site might rank well in any search engine. Each situation is different and unique in its own way. Concentrate on building it right from the bottom up, and you will succeed.

About the author: John Colascione is the owner of Searchen Networks Inc, a search engine and internet marketing firm based in New York USA. Find more valuable information from John and other Searchen members in the forums at: Searchen.com

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