Does keyword usage in the footer have an effect on how high a page ranks?

[Santaur]

My client has a lot of text about their company in their footer. Is the text in the footer associated with the on page keyword usage and density for all pages or none of the pages?

[Guest]

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[MikeTek]

1. I would not expect the footer text to hurt on-page SEO. "Duplicate content" does not mean any repeated content whatsoever across your pages. This flag only goes up for Google's filtration purposes when the vast majority of content on the page is duplicate to another page.

There are countless sites across the web with similar "template" content that occurs across all pages, and this does not impede them from ranking or draw any filters/penalties against them.

2. Keyword density is not worth focusing on. It can safely be dropped from your SEO work at this point.

3. I'd look at this from a usability standpoint. If you have reason (data) to believe the footer content is being read by users and therefor actually serving a purpose, I'd recommend leaving it as-is. If nobody is reading this content, or it simply clutters the page unnecessarily, it's a good idea to remove it in favor of a more straightforward user experience.

[Santaur]

Thanks Mike and Charles. I actually am concerned about the duplicate content issue because the site is mostly images and not a lot of text, so I decided to convert the text in the footer into an image on all pages but the homepage.

I'm surprised that keyword density doesn't matter at all. In the on page optimization here at SEO Moz they still recommend using your keyword phase at least 4 times.

[MikeTek]

Probably a safe way to go - even with images comprised mainly of images I'd be surprised if you saw a negative impact from the footer blurb, but I've been surprised before.

To clarify: yes it's a good idea to mention your target phrase a few times, outside of your Title and H1 tags, in as organic a manner as possible. However, the "keyword density" most people discuss is related to calculating some percentage, attempting to determine the "optimal" density of the keyword phrase related to other copy. This is the "waste of time" I was talking about - sorry for the lack of clarity there.