Does Keyword Density Help?
The question on keyword density has been asked often enough that it deserves a little attention. However, quite frankly, I think both the term and the concept are over rated.
Keyword density is defined as the number of times your keyword appears in your content as opposed to the number of words in the content. In other words, if you have a web page with 1,000 words on it and you use your keyword 200 times on that page then the keyword density will be 20%.
Sidebar: If your keyword density is 20% then it’s way too high.
What you need to understand about keyword density is that there is no optimal density that will ensure your web pages get indexed by the search engines. Search engines look at hundreds of criteria and none of them are more important than all the others; that said, some of them are more important than others. Keyword density falls in the middle of the pack – not super important, but somewhat important.
Keywords, you are probably aware, are very important. Try building a website without them. What are people going to search for? How are they going to find you? But do you need to spend your time trying to figure the exact number of keywords to use for your page? No. And the reason is pretty simple. It all really boils down to the avoidance of the two biggest sins regarding keywords:
- Not enough
- Too much
Some SEO experts will tell you the optimal keyword density is 3%-5%. There may be some truth to that, but keeping your keyword density in that range won’t ensure that you’ll rank highly for those keywords. Nor does it mean if your keyword density is higher or lower that you won’t rank highly for those keywords. There are other factors at play. Those other factors are the hundreds of other search criteria measured by the search engines in their algorithms.
The most important thing to know about keywords is to use them naturally. Your website content should be written in such a way that keywords don’t seem forced. If you start every sentence with your keyword, the content will look choppy and unnatural. You don’t want that.
On the other hand, if you don’t include your keywords enough then you likely won’t rank well enough in the search engines to get the kind of traffic you want. So I always tell people to write naturally just they were talking to a friend. After you have written a great web page without thinking about your keywords, go back through and think of where you can place your keywords without making them seem forced and unnatural. Then, start working on building your off-page SEO.
One final word: Keyword management is a continuous process. There is no optimal density that will ensure success. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on it.
3 Responses to “Does Keyword Density Help?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
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I have a totally different definition of keyword density and wrote four articles about it.
Keyword Density is key to SEO
http://heartdaughter.com/blogs/elijah/index.php/2007/06/27/192/
Keyword Density is key to SEO- Revisited
http://heartdaughter.com/blogs/elijah/index.php/2007/07/02/224/
Meta Keyword and Description Density Defined
http://heartdaughter.com/blogs/elijah/index.php/2007/07/12/278/
part 4 in the series
SEO tips for Meta Description / Keyword Density, Blogskinny, and self hosted WordPress
http://heartdaughter.com/blogs/elijah/index.php/2007/07/23/328/
My method is giving me high ranking in SERP
nada
Thanks Nada,
I’ve approved this comment despite its blatant self-promotion because I think it has some benefit to my readers. But I’d like to reply.
Keyword density is correctly defined as the number of times your keyword appears versus the number of words on your page. One could be fooled into thinking that the higher the density the better because search engines look for keywords. This is mostly true. However, there is no optimal density. The keyword density dilemma can best be summed up with these points:
1. 100% density is spam. No search engine on the planet will approve of this.
2. 0% density is no density at all. You won’t rank. Duh.
3. Anything between 0%-100% is more desirable than either extreme.
4. There is a point above 0% below which if you fall your website might rank, but that rank won’t be significant enough to get you much traffic.
5. There is a point below 100% above which if you go your web page will still be treated as spam.
6. Because search engines consider factors other than keyword density such as anchor text, inbound link quality, code to content ratio, and hundreds of other criteria, it is impossible to predict what those points in #4 and #5 above are.
7. Your competitors will be compared against you and everyone can’t be No. 1 and there are only 10 places on page 1 for each keyword.
8. Constant algorithm changes by the search engines make it impossible to predict the perfect keyword density – what may be good today may not be good tomorrow.
Bottom line: While keyword density is worth considering for every page of your website, it’s pretty fruitless to spend much time trying to figure out what the perfect density is. The answer is, the perfect keyword density is whatever will get you sufficiently ranked in the most search engines to provide you with targeted traffic to the degree that your efforts pay off and that will not penalize you for spamming the engines. What that is exactly varies from page to page and from day to day. Good luck trying to second guess the process.
the correct keyword density is 16.7%. wait, make that 17.3%. no, 12.2%. Oh, forget it.