There’s always going to be issues with mass article submissions as if Google find the same content they will put in their supplemental index, however that does necessarily mean it won’t pass any link juice or relevance and your site certainly won’t be penalised for it. I would look to submitting maybe twice a week to the main directories ezinearticles, articlebase, goarticles etc, and directories need to be as relevant as possible but they are out there.

I’m a strong believer in writing great content but unless you have links no one will find it, when academics write a piece of research they publish it at hundreds of academic journals but this never effects the rankings of the university website where the link points to. My advice is to get links from as many ethical avenues as possible great content, content distribution, social media, community participation and blogs.

With regards to keyword density were mainly looking in the body tag, however adding keywords to categories, tags and post titles is always a good idea for increasing relevance.

Hope this is OK, let me know if something’s not clear

A quick question on keyword density on a blog: is the body text the only text that counts or does text in the columns (tag clouds, top posts, most recent posts, etc.) also get factored into the density count?

Great post. Thanks.

Ok let’s try and clarify this.

1- I had a quick look at your site, if you were targeting the keyword “potato recipes” then yes this keyword should appear at the beginning of your title tag for maximum effect, however you already rank in the top two positions and changing probably wouldn’t cement your position, I would say the keyword is prominent enough in your title tag.

2- Yes the h tags are the headings h1 – h6, to be honest I seriously question their ranking weight, only worry about the h1 and 2, simply ensure your keyword “potato recipes” is in the h1 and a similar variation is in the h2. The effects will be minimal but it’s a good idea to tick all the boxes.

3 – I personally don’t think the “post tags” are all that important, they help create a little relevance and thats about it. It’s simple enough to use them but don’t expect a big increase in rankings.

Hope this helps.

The name (title) of my site is Potato Patch Recipes. I bounce around the 1 and number 2 position on Googles page 1 for the term Potato Recipes. Are you saying that it would have been better if I had a name and title that had potato recipes as the first two words?

When you say “H” tags I assume you mean h2, h3, h4, etc… If that is so, can you consider writing a post on the proper way to use these tags. I kinda made up my own rules based on nothing in particular.

Last, the tags that you use at the end of the post, like technorati tags or wordpress tags, how important are they and what exactly do they do?

Thanks….Another good, informative post.

Thanks for your comments.

I am slowly putting together graphs showing the average SEO factors of 10 sites that have managed to rank for competitive terms, quiick. Expect them within the next few days.

P.S. are you going to release the data or graphs?

Sorry should have explained a little better.

Directories are simply sites dedicated to categorising links. http://freeindex.co.uk is a good example of one and obviously the Yahoo directory and DMOZ are the biggies. You will have to submit your site to them in order to be considered for a listing and a backlink. Article directories are sites such as http://goarticles.com, http://ezinearticles.com, you write content and in return are able to set up a back link to your site, don’t forget to anchor it with your keyword.

PR’s are actually press releases, site http://www.24-7pressrelease.com, provides an affordable distribution method for sending out news on your products and services to the press. I wouldn’t expect too much traffic from these methods, it’s the links you want.

I personally believe a new site should be spending 50% of it’s link building efforts on these methods, the other 50% should be used to make great link worthy content and getting it noticed socially.

As I said in the article SEO isn’t magic it’s just hard work and patience.

Keep going

In PageRank and LInkQuality you mentioned “…came from directories, article directories and PR’s.”

What are ‘directories’, and what are ‘article directories’?

I guess ‘PRs’ have something to do with pagerank but I am not sure what you mean. Please explain.

You have helped focus my mind and tell me where I should be putting mental effort – which is in looking for a keyword phrase that is searched but not so competitive that it’s useless to use, which describes out unique selling point and is the ‘master’ phrase I should use in our title (and tweak for other pages).

It’s not easy, brother