Here’s another topic for our SEO Basics series.    Does the appearance of keywords in the body of your webpage affect its ranking?   The answer according to most of the SEOs is yes.    However, I do not recommend keyword stuffing.    Keyword stuffing is what you call when you put so many keywords in a page or repeat the same keyword over and over again.

So how many keyword occurences should there be?   What’s the right balance.   There isn’t a specific number but most SEOs think it is best to have a keyword density somewhere between 3% to 7% of the page.   Keyword density is a measure of how often your keyword appears in a page.   If the keyword appeared  3  times and the total number of words in the page is 100, then that’s 3% keyword density.

Here’s one activity you can do today.     Use one of your webpage as a test.    Check out its ranking in google for a certain keyword.  Now adjust its keyword density to about 5%.   You might need to mention your keyword a couple of times more for this.  Then after a week or two,  check google again and see if your webpage increased in ranking.

It is a must that you do not change anything else so that you will only see the effects of the keyword density of the webpage.

Don’t forget to leave a comment here if you see an increase in your ranking.    I really love to hear from people who are new to SEO and who experience some positive results.

Yahoo search suggestions, which used to be an exclusive feature on the Firefox toolbar, is now available via Yahoo.com. According to the announcement, you will be suggested with related terms as you type your query. For example when searching for Las Vegas, Yahoo suggests several functions in Las Vegas… This feature has been available on Google for a while now and I am not sure what ranking of the different suggestions is based upon (besides the word offcourse).

To Disable this feature you can simply click on “Disable” in the suggestion box or at the “More” drop down.