One of the things we don’t seem to have much of these days is time. Everyone rushes everywhere and communication is compressed into new shorter forms like all of the text messages I receive, I still don’t get all of the abbreviations. There is a danger that this short, fast communication is carried over into web sites we develop. All short, bulleted points lacking any grammar or sentence construction, and as I have said before search engines seem to like well-constructed grammatical sentences.

However, there is another knock-on effect of shortening text and that is the effect it has on key words. I am not really talking about the meta tag keywords here, but the words in the text that the search engines find multiple times. This is often known as key word density i.e. what percentage of the text is taken up by a single word or multi-word phrase. Have you ever considered this in writing your own code? Have you thought yourself very clever, by managing to get 100 instances of your key word in one A4 page?

Having your keywords and phrases sprinkled throughout the text is obviously good, but how can you ensure you don’t overdo it. Well, one way is to spend time creating a more lengthy piece of well-written text. This will mean that although you still have lots of key words and phrases in there, their relative density is reduced because of the greater overall volume of text.

Finally, just a word on meta tag keywords. The importance attached by search engines to keywords specified in the meta tag has greatly reduced due to the overuse of this feature. Many sites I have seen have tried to use the same keywords over and over again. Our advice is to choose these words carefully and use maybe 4 or 5, but don’t go over board. Then try and use them throughout the actual page text, but without forcing the density. After all, if they really are your key words, then using them in the text should come naturally.