What is Keyword Density?

Standard Definition

Keyword density can be defined as,

The ratio of a keyword occurring on a web page compared to the total words viewable.

Simply put, the more a seo keyword is used in your article, the more are your chances of making into the first few pages onto various search engines. This makes keyword density one of the most important factors to be considered in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Keyword density used to be one of the only factors making or breaking your page for SEO, however over the decades, it has become a very minute factor since over time other algorithms have started to be put into practice to bring in more precision in online search.

Present Definition of Keyword Density

In terms of techniques, higher keyword density is considered good however it too is capped to a mere seven percent since higher keyword densities are rather spamming techniques than legitimate words. To get better search results now search engines use other factors like semantic searching, anchor text linking, the website’s age, link building strategy, fame and visitor hits etc.

How to Measure Keyword Density?

Keyword density can be easily measured using the simple formulae of the total number of occurrences of the keyword/ total number of words x 100. However with the passage of time this formulae added with other smart tools are available online to help you analyze how certain keywords are used on your webpage.

WordPress, for example, uses word clouds for its users to see how a webpage has keywords divided into clouds of words in an interactive graphical interface.

Decreasing Keyword Density to Avoid Spamming

Keyword density is to be decreased to not let search engines or SEO websites think of your webpage as to be spammed with keywords. This can be easily avoided by adding these keywords in headings or bolded figures as search engines consider them important. Elsewhere, repeated keywords can be troublesome bringing down page ranking.

This can be avoided by rephrasing sentences, use other words or simply replace the words by their synonyms. It also looks appealing to the eye to have less repetition of words and users are more likely to get back to the page in future too.

Keyword density might not have as much importance in terms of getting high page rankings as they are used to check the over use of the keywords to avoid spamming and lowering the ranks. Since pages with less over usage of words are pleasant to the eye, it won’t be wrong to mention here that returning customers and good page ranking is a bloggers dream come true.