SEO questions

1) Does using tags such as bold, italic and blockquote affect SEO? IF so what are other tags that can be used. Also, what is the difference between bold and strong in terms of seo?

2) Does using different tenses and endings of keywords affect the keyword density? Will search engines see kick, kicks, kicking and kicked as the same word or will they all have their own density score?

3) Which keyword density tool do you use as I have tried a few and the density scores differ between the tools by almost 4%.

 

1) yes, but it's not gonna make or break you. I usually only use such tags to better target my adsense, or if it suits the text. Strong is the original, so I always think that it is better for SEO than bold, but thats just a hunch. Bold was introduced to help transistion people from word processors.

2)From what I know, most SE Spiders will see the word kick in each word, but will treat them as different words, although it will notice that the word kick is the root of each.

3)My Brain. I think the tools are useless. Make your pages read well. The one thing that will help your SEO the most is visitor experience. If they page reads well the visitors will reurn, link to, and enjoy your site. You have to build your pages for your visitors if you want to be succesful. The most poorly optimized page will get great ranking from SE's if their visitors naturally want to link to them. Use your keywords in your title, use it naturally on the page. use it in your meta description (you have one of those right?) and don't worry to much about it. Find other ways to get traffic too, Real SEO takes years for top results.

 

If you are using more than, say, 7 % keywords density... it indeed looks unnatural. You might use this tool to check - http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/