SEO Keyword Density - occasionally less is more

Keyword density represents the percentage of the number of times a keyword or phrase is used in the text of your webpage compared to the total number of words used on the page. It plays a really significant role in an article because keywords, how and where they’re used, decide the quality of the article and its rank in search engine search results.

An unethical practice of keyword use

Many SEO copywriters believe that including their targeted keyword or keyword phrase a ridiculous number of times will help them gain a better position on the Web. The truth, nevertheless, is that this type of method can seriously work against you. Almighty Google, for example, has a keyword density requirement. And in order to gain better rankings on the site, you should abide by its conditions.

Avoid keyword stuffing

Many new search engine optimizers may feel tempted to use the exact same keyword over and over again in an attempt to rank first place for their target keyword. This is also known as “keyword flooding.” The method involves a writer overloading the content as well as the Meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword related to the site in different ways. Clearly the keyword density in this practice is far from balanced. Content produced using this practice will probably be classified as spam by readers and all the search engine algorithms altogether. Once the search engine crawler comes to examine your site, its algorithm can easily and very easily determine whether a keyword or phrase is being used an unusual amount of time, which is not good news. The results of keyword flooding could involve a severe drop in web ranking and a complete removal of your site from the search engine index.

Know how much is too much

Say you wrote an article that’s about 300 to 400 words long. The primary keyword or phrase should appear no more than six to eight times. Do not use the keyword in every other sentence or in the very same paragraph. Search engine giant Google doesn’t allow more than two percent of a web page’s text to contain keywords or phrases. So if the article is 500 words long, you are able to include the keyword no more than 10 times. The allowed keyword density percentage varies with different search engines. MSN and Yahoo, for example, may accept up to five percent. There are many free online tools that will help you determine the keyword density of your web page.