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What is Keyword Density?

As you learn more about search engine optimization, you will often hear people referring to the keyword density of a Web page. Keyword density just tells you how often a given keyword or phrase is used in the text of a Web page.

Keyword density is measured as a percentage, for every 100 words you have written on a Web page, it indicates how many times a given keyword or phrase appears. If your keyword phrase shows up 5 times for every 100 words, then your keyword density is 5%.

Now, having this knowledge used to be considered very important for getting a Web page ranked well in search engines such as Google and Bing. The theory was, if you repeated a word often enough then that would convince the search engine algorithm that your page was very relevant to the topic and thus you would rank highly for that keyword or phrase. Unfortunately search engine optimization is never quite that cut and dried. The operative words here are "considered" and "theory", no-one ever managed to prove that keyword density existed as an algorithmic component.

However, not long after keyword density became a popular concept, many websites tried stuffing their keyword or phrase in as many times as they could. Whether the resulting Web page was readable by humans or not, was not seen as a priority by these short-sighted Webmasters. Naturally, the search engines could not tolerate this situation as it degraded their users' experience. Therefore, they reworked their algorithms to penalize the blatant keyword spam and the worst offenders found their websites deindexed for doing it.

As the SEO industry matured, some people decided that a certain amount of keyword density was what would let you rank well. So "experts" started advising people to build Web pages which had a keyword density of at least X% but no more than Y%. There were many variances in recommendations, but after a time the consensus was to have at least 3% but not more than 5% keyword density on each page. The problem with even those seemingly small percentages however, is that it's not always natural. Depending upon many factors - the overall topic being written about and the writer's style for example - keyword density can be all over the place. In some cases it would be less than 1% and in others it could be more than 10%. The correct lesson to draw from this is to always treat any consensus position with caution.

The general rule of thumb these days is not to worry about keyword density unless you feel you may have overdone things. If you write each page of your site naturally, then related words and phrases will automatically be used as part of your writing process. And modern search engines recognize those related phrases, so they know when you are on topic or not without you having to use words and phrases a specific number of times.

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