Thoughts and Facts about Keyword Density

What is the right keyword density? Do all search engines like same keyword density? How to avoid keyword overstuffing penalties? All this questions are answered in this article. Moreover, you will get some additional thoughts and points over keyword theory. Get involved! Keyword density as an optimization unit. Keyword density is a correlation of quantity of all words on your page with quantity of keywords. Keyword density is usually expressed in percents. For instance if you have 100 words and seven of them are keywords – your page’s keyword density is 7%. Keyword density is always measured per-page, never per site, because search engines consider a page to be the smallest independent unit. What keyword density is allowed by search engines? All search engines have a lot of

criteria to measure a web page. Keyword density is one of them and it is one of appreciable ones. Search engine algorithms are complicated mathematical measures and each search engine has it’s own – that is why allowed keyword density can vary for different search engines. If you are targeting one search engine – you can try to find out it’s allowed keyword density and keep it. If you target two or more – keep minimal keyword density allowed by one of them. What are actually keywords and how search engines find out what are keywords on my page? We know that keywords are search terms we seek, but a search engine doesn’t knows what keywords have you actually installed in your web page, unless you list them in META keywords tag (however, it is more like that the majority of search engines ignore this tag). So how do I count keyword density. Count the maximum repeating words! Even if your site is about apples, but there are more “garden” words – search engine will count maximal quantity of similar words. This means that you have a total of 100 words, 10 of which are “apple” and 30 of them are “garden”, you can get penalized for “garden” word. Note that articles, pronouns and other keyword-neutral words are not counted as keywords. The most convenient way to get full keyword analysis of your page is to use appropriate software. There are a lot of free and pay keyword analysis tools online. There are another significant notion in counting keyword density of a page – keyword phrase. You know that some keywords consist of two words – product names, geographical names, etc. Search engine algorithm is also looking keyword phrases, which are defined by finding repeating keyword phrases. Clear? I hope so. How do I count up right keyword density? It is a unique way of research for each webmasters. Yes, there are some commonly known recommendations, but during last two years I’ve heard more than hundred numbers of “right” keyword density. Create a couple of page with different keyword density and optimize ‘em in the same way (this doesn’t means creating a couple of identical pages with different keyword density, because you will trigger duplicate content filter doing so) and see the results. Sometimes it takes many time to find out the right value. Some of my sites are under 10% limit, some have no more than 5% - you will find your best quantity soon, trust me. However, there are some variables which can influence allowed keyword density – position of keywords. I believe that keywords in H1 are considered heavy, just as keywords in links text, keywords in “bold” tag and those, which are placed close to the beginning of the document. That is why there is no definite quantity of keyword density.

source: http://searchenginejournal.org/thoughts-and-facts-about-keyword-density.html