Can someone clarify the importance of Scribe SEO?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Google Analytics (GA4) recommendations for SEO analysis?
Guides on Moz and elsewhere mostly refer to Google Analytics' Universal Analytics (UA). However, UA is being replaced with GA4, and the interface, options, and reporting are very different. Can you recommend a clear, thorough, and effective walkthrough of how to set up useful SEO reports in GA4? Is there a simple tool you recommend that will help connect historical data from UA to GA4 when GA4 is the only option available? If there's no simple tool, what values do you recommend retaining from UA for effective historical reporting? How would you use them? At minimum for reporting, I'd want to show month-to-month changes and year-to-year changes (in percentages and in real numbers) for the following: all site visits all organic visits organic visits as a percentage of all site visits organic visits that led to a specific goal completion organic visits that led to any goal completion Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P1 -
What are best SEO plugins for wordpress?
Hi, I hope you are doing well. I want to know what are the best SEO plugins for wordpress website? https://www.myqurantutor.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | Bigbrand0 -
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
E-commerce data import Google Analytics
Hi there, Since a few weeks we have started a cooperation with a big online wholesale company which now sells our products. I want to import simple E-commerce data: amount of transactions and revenue. More detailed data such as amount of products, name of products, etc. is not necessary in the first place. Now I discovered the 'data import' functionality in Google Analytics but I can't find any suitable option for E-commerce data import. The data from the wholesale company is gathered in a nice export in a separate system, so there should be a way ti import this data into Analytics. Could anybody help me with this? Any advice is welcome! Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | MarcelMoz
Marcel0 -
Can you link several sites together in Google Webmaster Tools?
I have a client saying that there is a way to link 3 separate websites (A website for each department of a company) in Google Webmaster tools to tell Google it's basically one site but really its 3. Or to tell Google it's the same company and all the sites are one. I have never heard of this & I don't see the point in making 3 separate small sites & "linking" them as one in Webmaster tools. Is there in fact a way? Am I out to lunch on what they might be referring to? I am recommending they create one larger authority site with a page on each department & earn links for each department page & provide informative unique content for each page. Thoughts? Thanks for the help!
Reporting & Analytics | | DCochrane0 -
Basic Purpose of SEO moZ s subscription !!!!!
How the subscription for seomoz will help to improve the traffic of my website ?
Reporting & Analytics | | fullerenedr0 -
How would you measure the SEO success of new site launch?
It has been 12 months, and it is time for some serious SEO reality check up. I think we have done some really nice things (social integration, on page optimization etc) but we honestly could do a million time better on some other elements (anchor, text, link building etc...). Would love to hear from the community what would be the top 10 criteria you would use to judge the quality of the SEO work done for a new site during is first 12 months. PS: we are a very content rich over 1,500 new articles/post in our niche with 12 months - our site is migraine.com Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | OlivierChateau0 -
How can I track search engine optimization data in Google analytics?
My website is linked to a Google Analytics web property. But, I am not able to track search engine optimization data in Google Analytics. So, How can I get it done?
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit0