What is Keyword Density?

February 15, 2009

Keyword density indicates the number of times a particular keyword or key phrase appears in certain parts of your webpage, including the headline and the body.

Ideally, your content should include as many relevant keywords as it can. However, doing so could ruin the flow of your sentences and could end up reading unnaturally. This could eventually make your client look for another site that they can read better.

The best search engines employ search engine spiders to crawl over website contents and pull up pages and websites with keywords that correspond to the inquiry. The spiders can tell if your keyword density is unnaturally high, and your site will be reported to the search engine administrators. If they find that your website is just a flood of keywords without useful content, your website could end up being banned or black-listed.

Keyword density to your advantage
There are keyword density analysers that are available online. These analysers compute for your content’s keyword density. They work with different matrices but in the end, they all tell you when you’re using keywords a little too much. Generally, the acceptable percentage of keyword density for your entire webpage is between 3% and 8% in relation to the other non-keyword contents.

Having just the right keyword density makes you searchable without sacrificing the quality of your text content. Although keywords put in a lot of work for your website, the real moneymaker is well-written, relevant content.

When customers feel that you take the time to talk to them and address things that are important to them (in relation to your brand or product), then they’ll appreciate you more and reward you with their loyalty. And if they really like you, they’ll even tell their friends to give you a visit and check out what you have to offer.

Keyword Variations
In order for you to evenly spread keywords without making your content lose its flow, you can find ways to vary your keywords. If your chosen keyword is a noun, you could explore using its other forms: adjective, verb, and adverb.

It would also be useful if you come up with other relevant terms and create a set of keyword phrases, to give you more flexibility when writing content. This also allows your website to come up when users search with variations of your keywords or with other related terms.

Other ways to Integrate Keywords
Remember that content quality is still your primary concern. With good research and brilliant writing, it shouldn’t be difficult to naturally integrate keywords and keyword phrases without hard-selling. It is a good idea to include a space to accommodate visitors’ comments where you can also give your response. You can naturally include your keyword in your responses. Your visitors will also inevitably bring up your keywords in their messages.

You can make use of your content title and subheads to accommodate keywords. A good title and well-placed subheads will also make your website content more pleasant to read.