The Keyword Density and Dr. E. Garcia.

In this article The Keyword Density of Non-Sense, Dr. Garcia says that keyword density is a non-issue as far as SEO is concerned. Now I’m not willing to drive a steak through it’s heart yet, but I don’t think it’s that important a factor anymore. So I’m pretty much in agreement with the article. What bothers me is it’s yet another in a disturbing trend of unnecessarily pompous SEO articles. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about …

Constructing a lexicographical tree out of linearized content reveals the actual state and relationship between nouns, adjectives, verbs, and phrases as they are actually embedded in documents. It shows the effective data structure that is been used. In many cases, linearization identifies local document concepts (noun groups) and hidden grammatical patterns. Mandelbrot has used the patterned nature of languages observed in lexicographical trees to propose a measure he calls the “temperature of discourse”. He writes: “The `hotter’ the discourse, the higher the probability of use of rare words.” (1). However, from the semantics standpoint, word rarity is a context dependent state. Thus, in my view “burning the trees” is a natural consequence of misplacing terms.

Since this begs some obvious questions, I’ll ask them. Is it your intent to make the reader lose interest? Could you possibly make it any harder to follow or understand? Are you writing the article to teach and educate people, or to use a voluminous vocabulary and impress people?

Everybody has teachers in their life who took otherwise dull, uninteresting, or complicated subjects, and made them fun or at least interesting to learn about. People will enjoy and learn more from your writing when you are talking to them, instead of down at them from a position of intellectual superiority.