SEO can be a complicated beast. People can literally spend years studying how it works and how best to create SEO-optimized content. For any social media marketing strategy, posting the right things at the right time and with deference to the specific conditions and “rules” of the platform you are using is vitally important. So too though is ensuring that content is, at least to some degree, SEO optimized. And if you want to do this, keywords are, well, key.
When we discuss keywords in terms of SEO, the term “keyword density” is going to come up a lot. Keyword density is, just as the name suggests, the number of keywords you have in a particular piece of marketing text relative to the length of the text.
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How Keyword Density Works
Keyword density is therefore expressed as a percentage, and it is further complicated whenever you are using more than one keyword in a piece of text. It is important to stress that keyword density is only one tiny part of an SEO strategy. Engaged Media, social media content experts, advise that keywords should not only be used in tandem with other things like optimized website design and relevant, engaging content, but that they should be seamlessly integrated with those elements into a total SEO strategy.
What this means in practice is that balancing top performing keywords with the actual content of your text is vitally important. You can approach this in two ways, the first of which is to find the top keywords and then compose the text with those in mind. The second is to compose the text and find the relevant high-performing keywords that can be inserted seamlessly and naturally. Merely chasing after the top keywords and then writing content for it can lead to pretty contrived and unnatural content that suffers from so-called “keyword stuffing”. By the same token, writing about any old topic at all can end up precluding some keywords which you would be wise to include.
Keyword Density Strategies
So, how can you truly optimize a given piece of social media marketing text in terms of keywords? There are several steps to this process, but the most important things to bear in mind are to find the right keywords, avoid keyword stuffing, and to integrate your keyword choice into your wider social media strategy. In practice, this means that you will not be using the same keyword density for a Facebook post compared to a twitter post. Here follows some general steps:
Find the Right Keywords
What keywords are best for your post is something that is changing all the time. And of course, they will also vary depending on what your post is actually about. You need to find the right keywords by ranking for the top performing keywords within a certain topic area. Those are the ones to use.
Find the Right Density
To do this, take the number of times the keyword appears and divide it by the word count. Then, multiply that by a hundred to get a percentage. This figure should be around 1% or 2%. Any more, and you are risking search engines penalizing you for keyword stuffing.
Make it Seamless
The last step is up to the writer. Put simply, the keyword should blend into the text. Search engines will notice it because it should be a high-ranking keyword, but the reader should be blissfully unaware.
At the end of the day, it is likely there will be a bit of trial and error involved, but by proceeding carefully and ensuring your content is otherwise of top quality, you will get there in the end.