The choice and the position of the “target” words that can maximize your SEO

When Google scans the content of a web page, one of its goals is to “understand” what this page is about. This way, it will be able to provide interesting results to a user which performs a search on Google.

However, if for a human it is usually easy to understand what a page is about, it’s much harder for a computer – even if it’s Google’s.

One of the techniques used by these robots is to analyze the words or phrases that come up most often in the text of the page (target words). They also analyze the position of these words or expressions. Thus, a word placed in the title of the page will have more “weight” than a word appearing in just one paragraph.
What is the gross density ?

The gross density of a word (or phrase) within a page is the number of times the word appears in the page. It can therefore be seen as a way to give a score to that specific word on the page.

The problem with gross density is that it does not take into account the position of the words on the page, or more precisely the position of the words in the HTML structure of the page. This score is not sufficiently representative of Google’s vision for this word.
What is weighted keyword density ?

The weighted density also counts the number of times a word appears on a page, but it adds a multiplier based on the place where the word is found. Thus, a word found in the title of the page will have a larger multiplier factor than a simple word in a paragraph.

To calculate a weighted density, we must first choose a weight (or multiplier) for the different areas of the HTML page.

The main areas are:

title tag
meta description tag
the heading tags: h1, h2… h6
the paragraph texts
the text of the alt attribute of the image tags

Do not use simplistic techniques of word repetition

One of the first SEO techniques at the beginning of the Web was to repeat dozens of times the same “target” word in order to artificially inflate its density. But it’s been a long time since this simple technique does not work anymore. On the contrary, it may be detrimental to the optimization of your web pages.

Nowadays, we must carefully choose the words of our webpages, focusing on the most strategic areas, where we should avoid worthless repetition, especially in the same areas.