What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. Just remember, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

How important it is?

Keyword density on your site and pages is very important because most search engines use this information to categorize it’s theme or niche, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions and rankings in search results. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).

A good rule of thumb is to have a keyword density between 3-6%. The formula to calculate the percentage  is quite simple: you divide the total number of keywords or keyword phrases in your content by the total number of words.

For example if you have 30 keywords in a document that have 1000 total words, that would be a keyword density of 3% (which is the lowest keyword density your page should have for SEO purposes)—anything less than that and more than likely, your site won’t be listed high in a search engine especially for more competitive terms.

To achieve the ideal keyword density of 6%, you need to have 60 keywords or keyword phrases in a page with 1000 total words. In general, you should never have more than 6% keyword density, as the keywords tend to get repetitive in that case and actually hinder your site and you might get “flagged” for keyword stuffing.

Here are 3 easy steps to check the keyword density of a post on your blog:

1.  Copy and paste the body of the post into a program like Word or WordPerfect.

2.  Go to the Edit menu and click Select All. Now go to the Tools menu and select Word Count. Jot down the total number of word that appear in the post.

3.  Next use the Find function on the Edit menu. Go to the Replace tab and type in the keyword or tag you are searching for. Replace that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

If your article or page is on the server, you can use our free Keyword Density Checker Tool for the last step as it will return results for ALL words in the page.

How do you find your pages Keyword Density? And what percentage do you use?

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