Filenames contributing to high keyword density

12% keyword density

[Philiboy]

I'm optimising someone's website. The have a keyword density of 12% for one of their keywords on their home page. However it is not due to it being repeated especially in their main text, rather it is attributed to nearly all their file names involving the word (which happens, unsurprisingly, to be the theme of the website). Therefore the links to other pages on their site all contain the word - and this brings up their keyword density. Does anyone think it is worthwhile them renaming their web page file names to bring their keyword density down? I normally aim to keep keyword densities below 7% for good rankings.

[glengara]

Alternatively, replace some of the KWs in the text with synonyms, gets you ready for Semantics too... ;-)

[Philiboy]

The word in question is wine. Synonyms such as alcoholic beverage wouldn't sound right. Anyway, the density would still be high because of the number of uses of "wine" in the file-names and references to the files in the links from the home page to other wine-related pages on the site. Does anyone think that renaming the files would improve the rankings? When a human reads the main page, there is no feeling that the word wine is being repeated that often. The density of its use in the meta tags is also quite reasonable.

[glengara]

To be honest, I wouldn't obsess over keyword density, especially if your concern is mostly over file names.
If the site is already indexed in G and Y!, changing everything may be more trouble than it's worth.

[Robert Charlton]

Philiboy - I don't understand what filenames have to do with keyword density. I think of them as part of the code, not part of body text, and they shouldn't make any difference.

What you should be concerned with, and maybe this is what you mean, is too much repetition of your main keyword in your link anchor text. Here's a thread that may be of help, in which I obsessed about that very thing...

Avoiding excessive repetition in global text links
"Widget" really belongs in every link, but it may be seen as spam
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Philiboy]

I mean the characters "wine" occur frequently in the URIs e.g.
<a href="new-world-wine-tasting.htm">New World Tasting</a>

There are several "a href" statements involving "wine" contributing to a high keyword density. Take out these statements and the density is fine. Is it worthwhile renaming the files so the URIs do not involve wine, bringing the density down to below about 7%?

[Robert Charlton]

I mean the characters "wine" occur frequently in the URIs

These have nothing to do with keyword density...

[Receptional]

Regardless of what you choose to include in defining your keyword density, I wouldn't change the filnames if the site has been around a while. If you do, then you need to also do some clever stuff with the old filenames to ensure they all get propoer 301 redirects to the nearest new equivalent - otherwise your client will get a shock if they look at their logs after the change.

[Philiboy]

They have a few pages listed on Google i.e. their search engine saturation (to use the official term) is about 20 pages. They have little traffic, because their site hasn't been optimised and promoted with the search engines. That's what I'm doing for them, so I'd like to get their keyword density right. They'd be happy to trap 404 missing files to direct clients to a nice page from which they can navigate to a valid page. Or I can keep the old files there as duplicates for a limited period until the site is reindexed by the search engines.

I'm still not sure, when analysing keyword density in general, whether to ignore URIs in the html. I use Axandra's IBP which does consider URIs. Will search engines spiders look at the URIs when investigating whether sites are spamming the search engines with repeated keywords?

[Robert Charlton]

Spammy looking URIs are another matter....

keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5.html is going to attract some attention. It probably won't hurt you... It will flag you.

But keyword1 in your URIs is not going to add to the keyword density of the linking page.

Rather than agonizing over minutiae like this, you're really better off focusing on getting some inbound links or writing some more content for your site.