I’m a big believer in a very specific kind of SEO: you probably won’t be surprised to learn that it’s high quality content. The fact of the matter is that I don’t think stuff like keyword density does a darn thing for you. If you want to rank well for a particular term, I’m pretty sure that a few high quality editorial links are far more likely to make a search engine sit up and take notice.

The math does seem to be with me on this one, although I don’t really want to run the numbers myself. But I’ve read more and more reports lately on how plenty of SEO strategies — like the utterly painful keyword density — are little better than urban legends.

Rather than depending on something with such a questionable level of effectiveness, I keep finding good content to be the best option for getting traffic from search engines. Good content is necessary to attract solid links — no one in their right mind links to an article that refers to the same three words thirty times in a paragraph. That sort of optimized writing style is truly unreadable unless you happen to be a machine.

Furthermore, no matter how much traffic you get from a search engine, its value drops if you don’t get anything in the way of return traffic. If visitors find your content difficult to comprehend — even moderately — they’re likely to head back to Google and check the next result on their search in hopes of a website that provides information in a way they can understand.