Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity rule state that you should always put the keywords that make up your key phrases together. Keyword Proximity can be better understood with the following example. Consider two words below.

• Optimizing keywords and key-phrases

• Keyword Optimization and Key-phrase optimization

When you consider both these words, the first one is good to read and is written in good English. But when it comes to search engine optimization, the second word will rank good as the keywords “Keyword Optimization” and “Key-phrase Optimization” are together and very close to each other. Sometimes, you feel that the text doesn’t look good for humans by following this rule. In such cases, make sure that the keywords are not too far from each other.

Search engine spiders are blind. They are software. They feel that a page having text with searched keyword repeated good number of times or page back linked with anchor text of that keyword is more relevant to the searched keyword.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density can be explained as the frequency with which a keyword or a key-phrase is repeated within the text of a page. Here, the text includes "content, heading and title and anchor text."

Consider the following example

• Keyword Density wonderfully explained

• Keyword Density

Though both the words are almost same, the second word will rank well for the Keyword Density criteria as the density for this key phrase is 100 percent and for the previous word "keyword density wonderfully explained", it is 50 percent.

There are only two ways to increase the keyword density.

• Reduce the number of words in the article or

• Increase the frequency of usage of keywords.

I suggest you balance both the points above equally, as over doing anything will be triggered as spam.

Formula of keyword density :- 

Number of words in the key phrase of a text * frequency with which they are repeated together / total number of words

Tip: The Keyword density should not be more than 2% and less than 0.5%. If it exceeds 2%, then there is a possibility that most of the search engines consider your site as a spam and if it is below 0.5%, your content is considered as irrelevant. Remember, the ideal keyword density is between 0.5 percent and 2 percent.

Keyword Prominence

 Keyword Prominence can be explained as the way or method by which robots or bots determine the value or importance of each word in any given section.

Almost all the search engines try to identify the most important words or links on a page or in domain. As the robots or bots are software, they depend upon the HTML to understand what the text is about and how important it is. If there is no guidance from HTML on a page, then the robots depend upon the Keyword Prominence to determine the importance of each word.

Keyword Prominence says that the closer a word is to the front of analyzed area of text, the more prominent it is. Spiders or bots feel that the word used in the beginning of a text is most important and prominent when compared to rest of the text. So they assign highest value to the beginning word and words that follow are scored lower.  

Consider this example

Movie from Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures Movie

Both mean the same as per humans, but if you are trying to optimize your site for the keyword “Universal Pictures”, then as per keyword prominence rule, you should use the title as “Universal Pictures Movie” as this has more prominence over the other title “Movie from Universal Pictures”.

Tip: Words that are marked between the heading tags are scored higher. Highest prominence goes to H1 tag, then H2 and H3.