Too many repeats

Surfing websites like I do all the time, I’ve become very good at spotting those which have been crudely SEO’ed to within an inch of reason. It’s very easy to get sucked in by the great Nirvana of good Keyword Density.

Time and again, you find tiny passages of content crammed with so many keywords in such a small space that they become almost unreadable. They have been optimised to be picked up by the Google Bots and the Yahoo! Slurps but for the end-user — the humble surfer wanting to find answers to questions and possibly buy your services — they can be practically useless.

As one part of my quest for good web content, I’ve written a tool which you can use to show how much you’re repeating yourself. Keywords aside, you should be aiming at variety in the way you express yourself.

The long answer is that keyword density is just one part of the picture. A well optimised website pays as much attention to density of content, back-links etc.

A friend pointed me to this tool which does some calculations to give an overview of how well the site works with search engines against others. One of the outputs is a comparison radar graph. What you want to see is a weird big space-hogging pentagon; anything less and your site is not what it could be.

If your site shows this big pentagon, then you’re obviously not obsessed with keyword densities. Good for you!


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