Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important, albeit tedious, task for any blogger or website owner. Without a good Search Engine Optimization strategy, it makes it extremely difficult for Search Engines to index and, more importantly, visitors to find your website or your articles. It is a well known fact that most visitors searching for information will click links on the first page of any search engine results. Some may dig deeper into 2nd, 3rd and further search engine results pages although these are a minority.
One of the most important aspects of good Search Engine Optimization is choosing good keywords (words that reflect your article content AND that people actually type in to search engines). Of course, choosing good keywords is only part of the battle. You also have to consider the level of competition from other sites, their PR ranking, backlink strength, domain age and the quality of their content.
Another important keyword consideration is keyword density and article length. What is keyword density? Keyword density is the metrics of how often your particular keywords appear within your article. Placement of these important keywords in your article’s title, meta keywords, tags, meta description, image names and Alt text and the judicious use of header tags round out the requisite steps to ensure your articles place well in search engine results.
But how does one go about measuring keyword density?
One of my favorite tools for measuring keyword density of online content is a Firefox Plugin called SEO Quake. With it, I can check the keyword count of my own articles and posts or those of competitor sites, which in turn allows me to tweak my own articles in an attempt to gain better search engine results placement.
The downside of using SEO Quake is that your content must already be posted and live before it can work its magic. A much better approach would be to measure your article’s keyword density from your Windows desktop before publishing it online.
I personally use WindowsLive Writer to post my articles to my websites but I generally start by typing everything out in Microsoft Word. However powerful Microsoft Word is, one tool it lacks for web publishers and bloggers like you and I is one that would allow for keyword density metrics and analysis.
Luckily, there are a few capable applications specifically designed for the task of measuring keywords in Windows Desktop text files. The following are 3 extremely capable keyword density tools for desktop use and, best of all, they are free!
e3KWD Check 3.0 Keyword Analysis Tool
e3KWD Check 3.0 is a lightweight, fast and free program for analysing keyword density within web and text documents, written for Windows platforms (95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP/Vista).
This tool allows you to run real time analysis tasks upon your local copy while writing or editing. If you have an active internet connection it will also retrieve and analyse online web documents using the built-in address bar.
Pazintys Keyword Density Tool
Pazintys Keyword Density Tool is an especially small, lightweight and simple application to calculate the word density in the text files.
Text keyword density has critical impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and in determining placement on search engine results pages.
Pazintys does not require installation and at only 30KB, can easily fit onto, and be executed, from your USB Flash Drive.
Duplication And Density Checker
Duplication And Density Checker is another desktop analysis tool from 30 Second Smile.
This simple piece of software is a two edged sword as it is able to perform two very important tasks for content creation.
This software will run on your desktop and enable you to compare two articles for duplicate content and also enables you to quickly see the keyword density of your text files.
