Last week, Google announced that it will train and certify SEO professionals as part of its new Google Career Certificate scholarship program. The Search Engine Optimization training course is included in the digital marketing curriculum.
The other day, experts found recommendations in SEO training materials regarding the minimum amount of text on pages and keyword density, reports SearchEngines.
According to one of the slides on Keyword Research and Composition, content on a page should be more than 300 words in order for the page to be more likely to rank high in search results. Keyword density should be less than 2%, meaning “2% of the words on the page or less should be targeted keywords.” In addition, the mandatory inclusion of keywords on each page in certain places is recommended – heading, subheading, first paragraph, conclusion.
If, as stated, the training is conducted by Google employees, and all the information in the course is taken from the Google search documentation, then how is it that the recommendations for the number of words and keyword density ended up on this slide? After all, Google has stated countless times that webmasters and SEOs should not focus on keyword density or word count.
With this question, SEO specialists turned to Google employee Danny Sullivan, who replied that he was not part of the team that prepared the training course, and it was not part of the search team. Google search doesn’t recommend any word count or “density” limits or anything like that. According to him, such recommendations can be ignored.
However, SEO professionals still have a lot of questions about the quality of education in Google’s free career courses, notes NIXSolutions. Will there be specialists who will check the content of all taught disciplines for such blunders?