Sometimes high density ranks well too?

[Travoli]

Hi all,

I am working with a site that has very little content on its pages. The keyword density analyzer on SEW says I have 22 words total on some of the pages. After I added SE friendly Titles, Metaa keywords, and Meta descriptions, one of the keyword densities is 15% and another is 19%!! Problem is it is so easy to hit those numbers with so few words. The words are scattered in the parts of the page that I cannot change (menus) but they were not previously in the important areas (title). I know 10% is the target for a keyword. Is this absolutely considered spam by the SE's or would the algorithms recognize the small number of total words also? for example, if I had a site with 3 words on the page, each word, mentioned once, would have a density of 33%. But I could not be considered spamming, could I?

I am betting the answer is going to be "get the KW density down no matter what" Just need to be reinforced on that before I go un-doing my hard work.

[spiky]

AV is likely to penalise but if the content is good, other's may not.

OPD listing will help. We have a page with similar KWD with good listings, helped by OPD we think when Inktomi results are shown.

Content seems increasingly all important.

[WebGuerrilla]

I would take the time to look at other pages within your niche. Density isn't what it used to be. It's not uncommon for pages with the desities you mentioned to do well. (Especially at Google).

[Travoli]

Yes, we do horribly on Google. We do GREAT on MSN (our top referrer) and Excite for some reason ranks us #5 for a single, hugely competitive keyword. Other results are almost nowhere to be found because until 2 months ago, nothing was ever done for SE ranking. Keywords that people use to search for our site are Ultra-competitive (Wordtracker lists 2 top keywords as top 30 searched for on the top 500 list). AV listed 19,000,000 results for one of these words. Unfortunately there are only a few main keywords for the category, and phrases always contain the words.

The site was nasty looking 2 months ago. 2 bodies in the HTML, 2 sets of Metatags, etc... on a lot of the pages. Also the metatags were 1000 words or longer. There were NO title tags, and the programmers had a script running to auto-submit to AV each week.

So the rankings can only get better! :)

But you say that for Google, you must have 10% or less for EVERY word, correct. A strange occurance on one page is that an irrelevant word has the highest density. Will this affect search results for relevant words that are at 9% density?

-Travoli