Take a look around real estate blogs and you’ll see nuggets of wisdom posted that look similar to this:

The Phoenix real estate market is a mess! If you want to buy a home in Phoenix, then you should consult with a Phoenix realtor who knows and understands the Phoenix real estate market. Never buy a Phoenix home without utilizing a Phoenix realtor! Feel free to search for Phoenix homes on our Phoenix real estate blog, but be sure to call your Phoenix realtor before you go too far!

Yeah, they’ll even bold all those keywords because some “SEO guru” told them that helps Google understand that those words are important.

If they’ve really been paying attention, they will even use< h1> < h2> tags like this:

 

The Phoenix Real Estate Market

The Phoenix real estate market is a mess! If you want to buy a home in Phoenix, then you should consult with a Phoenix realtor who knows and understands the Phoenix real estate market.

Use a Phoenix Realtor!

Never buy a Phoenix home without utilizing a Phoenix realtor! Feel free to search for Phoenix homes on our Phoenix real estate blog, but be sure to call your Phoenix realtor before you go too far!

Apparently the LOUDER YOU SCREAM AT GOOGLE the easier it is for Google to understand how to rank your article in search results.

Hogwash. Let me make a few points here before I delve too deep into this. . .

1) Google employs really smart people. Smarter than everyone reading this put together. That’s not an insult to you and me, that’s a compliment to the hiring department at Google. They are so smart, you really don’t need to yell at them, or repeat the same words over and over and over in order for them to get it. They’re good at writing code that figures out what you are trying to say.

2) Real estate blog readers are smart too. And when they see crap written like the example above, two thoughts come into their heads:

1. Why the hell is this guy bolding every eighth word? I get a headache trying to read it.
2. This guy can’t write his way out of a wet paper sack. Why would I want this numbskull to be my REALTOR®?

Is that really what you want your blog reader – a potential client – to think? Here’s my strategy on keywords and keyword density:

Write for your readers. Google will figure it out.

Ok, so maybe that’s grossly oversimplifying search engine optimization. And I’m sure some SEO expert is rolling their eyes and chomping at the bit to call me an idiot. Go for it, knock yourself out.

Yes, of course keywords are important. It’s hard, for example, for a search engine to “get” that your article is about “Phoenix real estate” if you don’t use those key words at all in an article. But how often do you have to use them?

I did a  quick search on Google for “correct keyword density” and found these opinions:

• Between 2% and 9%
• Go with 2%
• 2.8% to 3.3% (Really? you’ve got it down to fractions of a percentage now? What if you’re at 3.4%?)
• Max of 1.5%
• I always go for 7%
• 4 to 8% but 10% is allowed. (Allowed? By whom?)
• 3% to 7% is the perfect keyword density
• For articles, I stay under 2%. For blog posts a maximum of 4% (Uhm, what’s the difference?)

In other words, no one really knows what is optimal.

Maybe. It. Doesn’t. Matter.

Write for your readers. If you are writing about Phoenix real estate, then those key words will most likely occur naturally in your writing, and that really does seem good enough for the smarties at Google to figure things out.

Worry about the quality of your article, your spelling, grammar and writing well (or at least decently with fairly good sentence structure). Forget about calculating keyword density and forcing your article to contain some random percentage of words. Forced writing is just that – forced. It won’t read well, it won’t be followed well and you are WAY better off engaging with your readership than some random search engine bot.

Keyword density is WAY over-rated. Write naturally. Write like a human. After all, real estate blog readers ARE human. Well, at least most of them…

But hey, I am not an SEO expert. I’m just a real estate broker that blogs for business. Here is a terrific article where several well regarded SEO experts opinion on keyword density. What they say may surprise you, or that so-called “SEO Guru/Blogging expert” that seems to lie around every corner.

Hidden nugget of info: I would like this blog, and hence most of its articles, to rank well in search engines for “real estate blog” (and related terms like “real estate blog consulting”). Note “real estate blog” is in the title of this post (and the post URL), in the first paragraph of this post, roughly in the middle, and in the second to last paragraph as well. Additionally, the words “real estate” and “blog” (not together) are scattered about the article naturally. That happens. That’s good. Someday, when much more content is added to this new blog and it has received some back links, that ranking might be achieved. If you think you are going to dominate the search engines from one post, think again. This is a marathon folks, not a sprint…

To read the original blog post, please click here.

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