As described in a previous article, a website I am managing lost all its page rankings due to duplicate meta titles and descriptions generated automatically by Joomla, this was resolved using a third party component.

After Google had indexed my key pages, everything looked great, there were many natural incoming (backlinks) links to these pages, the content was good with the keyword mentioned a few times and good internal links. The Search Engine Friendly links (SEF) tool had been implemented and indexed by Google, before you ask, yes they definitely count, check the highlighted words on any search engine result page and you will notice that if the keyword is within the url it is highlighted.

Now it was appearing in the Google results pages, but it was stuttering, for instance one of the page sometimes ranked number ten on the first page then dropped down to the second page after a few minutes to position thirteen.

I realised something was wrong, on a whim I decided to check the keyword density with a great tool easily found by searching on Google, but didn't understand what the keyword density should be. After searching on my favourite search engine, I found a excellent article stating that for Google it should be 2% or less, otherwise the page will be marked as spamming. Yahoo and MSN (Bing) allow upto 5%, but we are not bothering with them as they are becoming obsolete and usually follow Google, so whatever does well in Google should do well in these search engines

After using this tool I realised that the Quran recitation page I was tweaking had a keyword density (of the targeted keyword) of 4%. After updating the content on the page, bringing the keywords down to less than 2%. Within 12 hours (updated so quickly as the pages had a lot of backlinks from other websites and Google follows this backlinks), the site I was managing came number three in Google for the keywords 'quran recitation' and 'quran recitations', yes the plural and singular version of a keyword/keywords makes a huge difference in Google search results, so you will need to aim for both versions.

This article was written on the 10th of January 2011, when you the reader check these keywords (also the locality of the search may make a difference) many months down the line, search results may have changed. SEO is a constant struggle with your competitors, it isn't an overnight thing and depending on how competitive the keywords are you may need to keep following your keyword results on a weekly or even daily basis. As I have realised  learn quran for kids in the past few weeks, it is also a constant learning process, there is so much to SEO and its all about getting the balance right, not that too many natural backlinks from different domain names is a bad thing, the more you have the higher the page rankings.

A lot of the SEO articles on the web are way out of date or the experts themselves are not always well informed or experienced, whoever says that keyword density doesn't matter, please ignore them.