Can someone clarify the importance of Scribe SEO?

[samersultan1]

Hi guys,

I was reading  The Beginner's Guide to SEO and was confused about the importance of keyword density.

As I see it, the main purpose of tools like Scribe SEO revolve around analyzing keyword density, however, Chapter 9 of "The Beginner's Guide to SEO" seems to downplay its importance and says

"Despite being proven untrue time and again, this myth has legs. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important metric. It's not."

If this is true, what is the real value of tools like Scribe SEO?  Currently, I follow keyword analysis tools very closely, and try to get the recommended density in my articles to help build back links.  Should I be focusing heavily on the density and prominence of keywords like I am in the picture below, or is there another way you suggest I go about using these tools?

PhJnV PhJnV

[Ecordia]

As the co-creator of Scribe I am more than happy to address your question.

First, Scribe is not a keyword density checking tool. It is designed to help writers in creating and structuring their content so search engines can better "understand" and index the content.

Second, Scribe contains a number of other features including keyword research/analysis, internal link organization and intelligent ways to connect your content with other sites through online relationship building tools. For a complete overview please go to http://scribecontent.com/demo/ for a video overview.

As to your specific point.

While density does not matter, frequency does. In information retrieval, term frequency is a very important part of most publish search algorithms used at conferences like TReC, etc. To see its importance, there are several excellent mathematical examples at http://www.miislita.com/ . Please note that Dr Garcia, who publishes at this site and was a consultant to us on Scribe v4, is the one that penned the epic "Keyword Density of Non sense" post that disputed the role of density as a ranking factor.

A key component of "understanding" content is both in the analysis of term frequency and term placement. While density calculations, when done properly, do provide some insight as to relative usage; the reality is that most all search systems review term frequency and weight it with other factors in order to determine the probability that a specific document is related to the query.

I think that Moosa H makes a good point in that you do want to write for humans first. Scribe helps you improve your writing to make it easier for search engines to understand what you are writing about.

Samer, thank you for your question and I hope my response provides some clarification to your question.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have a watch of this video by Matt Cutts, where he explains that the one thing people should NOT focus on is keyword density.

Andy

[MoosaHemani]

Keyword density is a real shit and i guess i have talked about this a million times and i have some strong logic behind this...

1. Write for Humans not Machines

Besides search engine, there are humans who must be more important than any other machine on earth (even more important than Google) because they pay you the real money. If you are going to care too much about keywords and not caring about how that will impact user experience you might win the rankings but might not win customers and all you will gain out of it will be the increase in bounce rate (may be some un-loyal customers).

2. Google is changing

Google is changing like anything... so getting top rankings for your desired key phrases just by keeping a good percentage of keyword density in it, might not work...

Why not play natural?

It’s good to be natural. It’s good to write for humans and not machines...so don’t really care about the density of keyword in the document but care more about how people will react to it.

Scribe SEO?

This software seems promising to me in a one go as it allows you to extract what’s hot from difference resources and get you the topics that will be most attracted to your audience in the current times.

Calculating keyword density can be a part of it but i don’t think they are based on this... so go creative and use this tool to get suggestions but relying on any tool (even SEOmoz) will be dangerous as this industry love quick changes...

[jombay]

The pricing is insane too. It's not worth putting the money and effort into using the software. It's just the hype copyblogger team is doing.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

About 5 years ago, I would rank pages for just about any moderately competitive phrase under the sun, pretty much by boosting as close to 5.5% keyword density as possible on a domain with a good bit of trust.  That mentality that you see in Scribe SEO could still gain some ground, but it's a little antiquated.

The issue that over time, Google's gotten smarter (and continues to do so).  Including keywords still matters, and not over-doing it does as well.  What's changed, is that Google has gotten better at understanding language.  Sure, you could stuff "cheap london flights" 15 times into a copy and probably still make it make sense if you really try, but should you?

Everything that you see Microsoft Word doing, analyzing grammar and reading levels, you can bet Google is capable of doing too.  And it's pretty well-established now that things like root word stemming (+s, +ed, +ing) and synonyms play too.  That sort of thing is more enjoyable for a reader too, so it stands to reason that Google would prefer it.  And, from what I've seen in recent years, it seems to look more and more like they do.

So, I'd include keywords/phrases.  I'd include them especially in first 1/3 of a sentence, paragraph, and page; lead in noun-first.  But I wouldn't let it dictate your writing too much from there.