I was emailing with Matt Cutts of Google and thought I’d share a couple of comments on the ever-popular topics of keyword density and “stale” copy.
Karon: You commented along the lines of “Put words on the page so the engines know what the page is about.” I’ve actually read many comments from other people that you no longer need to have your keyphrases on the page. That the anchor text of incoming links is more important than keyphrases in copy and – as long as you have great links – you don’t even need copy.
Of course, this is sheerly from an SEO perspective. These people are completely discounting the fact that you need copy for other reasons, too, besides SEO.
Matt: On-page copy is something that you have much more control over; it’s much more predictable to add a page of content to your site than to chase links. A tip for on-page SEO is to ask a person-off-the-street normal person “Does this text look artificial or spammy to you?” You don’t want to get anywhere near the keyword density that would cause an average person to arch their eyebrows.
To add to that, Matt also commented on his blog a while back, “I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.”
Karon: Can you comment on “stale” copy vs. “fresh” copy? I’ve also been reading a lot of posts, etc. on various blogs where writers are saying you must change your copy instantly every time your rankings shift in order to keep up or you’ll get pushed to the bottom. I have not found that to be true from my experience. It seems most feel that by “fresh” copy, Google means you have to continually change your page copy. It is my opinion that fresh copy relates more to adding fresh content to an overall site, not tweaking and rewriting your core web pages monthly or yearly (unless there are other reasons to do so).
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Matt: Copy is always a good thing to have on your website. I tend to write my copy deliberately so that it will “age” well, which helps to prevent it from going stale. If you are worried about staleness, make sure to add a date on the page so that new users have enough information to assess how much to trust older information. If you go back to reassess older copy, I would do it to see whether the copy is still accurate/helpful rather than just tweaking for tweaking’s sake thinking that search engines want a certain thing.
Hmm… sounds familiar. Didn’t I read that somewhere before? Or maybe it was here.
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