The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
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Keyword density tutorial

Worth mentioning is the often-misunderstood concept of keyword density.  In its pure form, keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears in relation to all of the other words on the same web page. For instance, if a page only contained one word of text, say “Chicago”, the keyword density for the word Chicago would be 100%. If, on the other hand, the only text on the page was “Eat at Chicago’s finest book store”, then the keyword density of Chicago would be 20%, since each word on the page represents one-fifth of the entire text (search engine’s ignore common words such as the, at, of, etc. - therefore the word at would not be included in our keyword density calculation).

Keyword density is one of the strategies that some search engine optimizers (SEOs) place way too much emphasis on. They’re usually under the mistaken impression there is some “magic formula” for calculating the optimal keyword density that will appeal to each search engine. While this was true in the past, it has largely ceased to be the case. At best, keyword density is only a bit-player in the big algorithmic search engine formula for top ranking pages. Regardless, you may still hear stories that Google prefers pages with a 5% keyword density or Yahoo likes pages with a 11% keyword density. There are a number of reasons why this is not an effective strategy for optimizing your web pages:

1. The concept of keyword density doesn’t take into account the location of the keywords on the page
   To say that a page has a 10% keyword density says nothing about whether those keywords are featured in your title tags, header tags, link anchor text, or any other of the important places to feature your keywords.
    
2. Keyword density also ignores the distance between keywords on a page, a concept known as keyword proximity.
   In general, the closer your keywords are to each other, the better. For instance, “Your premier resource for San Diego real estate information” is better optimized for the keyword San Diego real estate than “Your premier real estate information resource for the San Diego area”.
    
3. SearchEngineNews.com analysis of top-ranking pages in any search engine shows an enormous variation in the keyword density of those pages.
   Some top-ranking pages have a 50% keyword density. Others have as low as 0% keyword density. Indeed, we’ve found a few pages that rank highly for a keyword in spite of the fact that it doesn’t even appear on the page! In such cases, it’s the keywords in the anchor text of the offsite links that point to the page that’s causing it to rank at or near the top (which illustrates just how important it is to get your keywords into the anchor text of offsite links pointing to your pages!). Such a large degree of variation makes it all-but-impossible for anyone to determine just exactly what the “ideal” keyword density actually is.

The most effective search engine optimizers use keywords in ways that look natural and don’t waste a lot of time stressing over the exact number of times a keyword should appear on a page.

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book
Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.