Keyword Density

from Davin Ogden- SEO Strategist

Keyword density and the role it plays in your search engine optimization

Keyword density is actually the number of times a keyword occurs within a page on the web and how commonly the keyword is found compared to all the other words within this page.

Not so long ago, it was notorious practice to cram and hide keywords all over a page. You no doubt recognize seeing pages with thousands of keywords listed at the precise bottom. That will not cut it these days and is intended spamming of the search engines.

So let's say your teacher instructs you to write an 1500 word paper that has three distinguishable keywords or phrases. You can write in any style this is readable but you need to use the targeted keywords or keyword phrases throughout the paper. This is the opening step to smart search engine keyword writing!   

Keyword density starts with your title. It doesn't matter if it's an article, blog entry or individual page on a url site you get a greater “grade” when your title holds your main keywords. More “stress” or points will be credited to your keyword rich information when you use your keywords at the beginning of your title and each of your headings.

In order to understand top keyword usage, we first need to have some design of measuring keyword frequency. In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world,  frequency is actually referred to as density. Keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%         

 So when you hear someone say “keyword density”, this is normally what they’re talking about.

Keyword Density Analyzer

There are many keyword density analyzer tools on the market.  Fortunately, IBP also incorporates such a tool, and it also measures your website in contrast with your competitors to give you the edge on the level of keyword density that should be applied to out take them in the search engines.

Be #1 on Google and Yahoo!

Writing keyword rich content is an expertise that is learned. With approach and persistence, even making a mess of things, having to go back and fix them later, you will learn how to usefully place your prominent keywords where search engines want to see them while making your writing enjoyable to read for your visitors.

Search engines have a tendency to go through the leading one hundred words of any given page on the internet so keep that in mind when writing keyword rich content. Your grade for writing will depend heavily on how you use your keywords and keyword phrases in your titles, headlines, starting paragraph and opening sentence of each paragraph.  A good keyword density tool will help you in determining the amount of density you should be using.

Keywords carry out a key role in your search engine traffic,  in your website development, article writing, business blogging and link exchanges so take the time to master writing with keywords your potential customers and recruits will use to remember you!

However, with the advent of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), the importance of keyword density I believe will be playing a much smaller role in the context of legitimate SEO.  With LSI the search engines will be looking more at the site as a whole, and determining whether or not the information is relative to itself and to the other pages on a much larger scale. Therefore I don't believe that keyword density will be such a valuable determiner in the overall optimization of your website.