It’s long been a somewhat contentious issue, but its becoming increasingly clear that Google prefers a keyword level substantially lower than its competitors. In terms of percentage, many people now suggest the optimum keyword weight for Google is around 2%, with 3% pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Compare that, with an optimum level of around 5% at least for Yahoo! Search, and you suddenly find yourself in bit of a pickle.

Do you make the decision to optimize for Google, and hope you achieve at least a decent result in the other two major search engines, or do you decide to push your luck and up the keyword density to around 5%?.

It’s a difficult calculation to make, and the stakes are quite high when you consider that if your site does incur the wroth of Google, it’s not always easy to get your site out of the black book.

One excellent way of spreading the load, is too use synonyms. According to dictionary.com, a synonym is quite simply “a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in a language”.

Here are a couple examples.

Pool – can also be: pond and puddle
Search – can also be: seek, lookup, explore, investigate etc.

A good method of attack, is too formulate your primary keywords for each page, grab a thesaurus, and write down a few alternative words for each of your primaries. Then using keyword tools investigate each of those alternatives and see if they are partnered with any other text that relates directly to your topic. If you know your topic, it should be pretty easy to spot.

You’d be surprised at the some of the gems you can uncover using synonyms, and it’s a good technique to optimize for Google, while providing a little extra punch for the engines at the same time.