It becomes immediately obvious to someone who has a fair understanding of the principles of SEO that its use can present a problem. The more you use the right keywords, the likelier it is that Google will pick your site up and give it a good ranking. However, the more you use the right keywords, the less room there is for all the other things you want to say, and the less freedom to say things exactly how you would like to. It is a difficult balance to maintain, then, if you want to be SEO compliant and still write something that will be worth reading.

This is where you have to decide how you are going to maintain that balance. It is certainly not impossible to write well and be SEO compliant; you just need to find where you will place the keywords and make sure that the text around them is appropriately well-written. If you have a target of 500 words and want a keyword density of about 20-25 – an acceptable level and one which will get Google’s attention – then you need to make sure the other 475 are persuasive and coherent.

It also helps if you know how to use the keywords to make their use appear natural. If your keyword phrase for an article is “affordable TV repair”, then a sentence like “Affordable TV repair is not always easy to find” flows much better than if you just try to crowbar it in mid-sentence.