What is Keyword Density and How Do I make it Work for Me?
By: E. Avila | Posted: 18th May 2009
All articles are not equal - especially when you leave it up to search engines. An article written in a mediocre fashion may rank much higher with the search engines than one flawlessly written, stylistically-speaking. That's because search engines do not look for fluidity of expression or clarity in presentation. Search engines look for such things as keyword density and back links.
What does this mean exactly? Well, let's tackle keyword density first. A keyword is a particular word or phrase that a person uses when doing searches in Google or Yahoo or any other search engine. Let's say someone is searching for "organic produce." If you want your article on organic produce to rank high with the search engines, then your article needs to have keyword density. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword being searched for compared to the total number of words in your article. If your article has 600 words and mentions "organic produce" twice, it's going to get ranked lower than an article of the same length in which the phrase "organic produce" appears four times.
Now you're thinking that it would be easy to pepper your article with the term "organic produce" if that's all it takes to get it a high ranking in the search engines. Why just use it in every other sentence; that should do the trick. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. That's what internet marketers used to do in the early days. (We're talking about as recent as 10 years ago.) Webmasters even devised ways to insert keywords in ways that would be invisible to the reader but scanned by the search engines. Well, those engines are pretty smart and they caught on to the trick quickly enough. Some even began to penalize occurrences of what is called "keyword stuffing."
Currently, search engines prefer a keyword density of 1 to 3 percent. There's a formula for measuring it. It's (Nkr * Nwp / Tkn) * 100. Nkr = the number of times you use the word or phrase in your article. Nwp = the number of words in the phrase. (So "organic produce" has an Nwp of 2). Tkn = the total number of words in the article or webpage. Thus, your article of 600 words that mentioned organic produce twice would have a keyword density of .6% while the other article of the same length that mentioned the same keyword four times would have a keyword density of 1.3%. A much better ranking.
But what if your article necessitates your mentioning your keyword at a percentage higher than the preferred 1 to 3 percent ratio? Well, not to worry. These days search engines utilize themed, related keyword techniques to interpret the intent of the content of your article. If you use keywords in a relevant manner and consistent with the theme of your article, then that is taken into consideration.
These days, keyword density is still an important factor in how an article or a webpage is ranked, but it's not as major a factor as it used to be. Backlinks are another factor taken into account. But we'll look into that matter in another article.
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Tags: search engines, google, phrase, yahoo, density, internet marketers, expression, fashion, other search engine, 10 years, occurrences, clarity, fluidity, organic produce