Oct 13 2008

Optimal Keyword Density

Posted by Simon in SEO, blogging Tips
15 Comment

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Optimal Keyword Density for search engines

Keyword density refers to the ratio in percentage of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page. The optimal keyword density ratio will vary from search engine to search engine. In general, it is undestood that using a keyword density ratio in the range of 3-7%. Which means your keyword will be repeated around 3 to 7 times per hundred words.

Keyword Frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page. The theory is that the more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engine is likely to give the page for a search using those keywords. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to ensure it’s not an isolated case.

It is recommended that you ensure the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently used keywords in your web page.But as all things, don’t over abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

Keyword prominence.

Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page. The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of any web page, title, sentence or meta tag.

Keyword proximity.

Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. Its recommended the closer the keywords are, the better it is.

For example:

1. How Keyword Density Affects ” Optimal Keyword Density ”
2. How Keyword Density Affects “Optimal use of Keyword Density”

Using the example above, if we searched for ” Optimal Keyword Density ” a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.The reason is because the keywords are placed closer together.

Tips on Keywords within your webpage.

1. Include at least 100 keywords in page text
2. Use keywords at the beginning of the page, title or meta tag
3. Place keywords close to each other
4. Repeat keywords 3-7 times for every 100 words.

Here is where you should not have many keywords in the same webpage, image having 6 keywords repeating each one 3-7 times per 100 words of text, you will find it very hard to use correct grammar, etc for any sentence, therefore focus on 1 to 3 keywords.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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15 Comments on this post

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Nick said:

I don’t like this post…while these might be good tips for ranking higher in the search engines, we should be writing for our readers and for the text to be readable and enjoyable. Worrying about repeating the keywords a certain amount of times and working them in will take away from that.

October 14th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Simon said:

@ Nick , can understand what your saying, but some people prefer earn money rather than writing for real readers….

October 14th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
MLRebecca said:

I hadn’t heard about the keyword 3-7% ration. That’s very interesting. Using a keyword an average of 3 times per hundred words seems as though it would do wonders for your SEO. Thanks for posting all of the great tips!

October 25th, 2008 at 2:28 am
Michael 'Googled in 60 Minutes' Sherriff said:

While it is important that your target keywords are included on within the body of the page, it is more important that you have keyword rich hyperlinks pointing to the pages of your site. Keyword density plays a part in SEO and too high a keyword density can make your site look too spammy.

A well written and uselful article. Thumbs up.

October 30th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Irmscher said:

Thanks for these useful tips.
I am doing abit of SEO myself atm so I find this really useful
cheers

November 1st, 2008 at 10:19 am
Rika Susan's Home Improvement News said:

I know that 3% is recommended by many guys with SEO experience, but for me that is too much. It just doesn’t sound natural. I seem to do fine with 1% to 2% most of the time. So many other factors play a role as well. I try to compromise between writing for the engines and writing for the visitors.

November 1st, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Steve said:

I think in a perfect world, we could blog, without any worry about seo, but unfortunately, to get traffic you have to rank, so paying attention to things like keyword density is important.

I think it is important to note that there is a difference between keyword stuffing and keyword density, because it is possible to write perfectly legible content, while paying attention to keyword density.

November 2nd, 2008 at 5:27 am
Peter said:

I could agree with you for most of what you said on keywords, but I just can’t seem to get into full agreement with you about placing the keywords close to one another on the web page.
Just what significance is there about placing them close to each other? Rather, as a good writing technique, the keywords are intentionally positioned at various places eg at the start of the paragraph, at the footer etc and then a liberal scattering throughout the entire web page. I may be wrong, but that has been what I had been led to believe in all the while.

Thanks for any clarification. Cheers.

November 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Steve said:

For me optimal is max. 3-4% keyword density. So main task - natural content.

November 7th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Armen Shirvanian said:

This is a detailed look at the use of keywords. This concept of keyword density seems reasonable, as 5% of words being related to the key concepts present in an article feels appropriate. The idea that words being closer to one another is important for results also makes sense as well.

November 12th, 2008 at 3:07 am
DStudioBali said:

Usually I ilke to use 3-5% keyword density. ’cause I want to optimize my page for reader and also for search engine.

November 16th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Shanker Bakshi said:

In my initial blogging days i was ignoring these SEO Stuff - but i know how important these are to Impress SERP

November 21st, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Busby SEO said:

I am doing abit of SEO myself atm so I find this really useful. But I think you forget to mention about using keyword in H tags

November 25th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Keith S said:

I’ve always heard that you should use a natural approach to seeding your content with a keyword. Include it in the title, two or three times in the main body and make at least one bold face, and then end with your keyword. This seems to work fairly well for me.

December 4th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Leo said:

If it were only that easy….keyword density isn’t really as important as it were a couple years back. These days, Latent keywords are the buzz and google will rank pages higher (based on content, I am not factoring in other SEO onpage factors) if you speak the language of your niche.

I could show you case studies where a page with a lower keyword density gets ranked higher (all things considered equal..backlinks ect.) with a lower keyword density.

Google is making it harder and harder to game the search engines and I imagine when they fully implement the semantic web, this will change things for the better..for awhile at least.

January 2nd, 2009 at 2:43 am

Optimal Keyword Density