What is Keyword density?
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears in a page. So if there are 500 words on a page and your keyword “pigdog” appears 50 times on the page, then the keyword density for the word “pigdog” would be 10 or 10%.
Keyword density is used by search engines to determine whether a web page is relevant to a keyword or keyword phrase.
It is believed that the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of a page have more importance than the rest of a page when search engines ‘look’ at a page. In fact the closer to the top of the page the better. So if you can have keywords as the first words of the body text of a page that this is better to search engines.
What should I Avoid?
Some things to avoid would be Search spaming or as Eric Convey calls spamindexing. Spamindexing is a tactic used by black-hat SEO or individuals that do not know better where they repeat unrelated keywords or keyword phrases in an attempt to manipulate SERPs (search engine result pages) so that their pages show up more frequently in SERPs. Many search engines check for spamdexing and remove suspected pages from their indexes. The goal of search engines is to provide useful or relevant content to searchers. Rule of thumb here is that you know if you are trying to ‘fool’ search engines. If you want better results, then you should just be honest and natural. Yes, there are some rules to follow that you normally would not but the bottom line is honesty is being rewarded by SEs today. Spamindexing renders search engines useless. Google, the dominant search engine today is a multi billion dollar company. The do not take spamindexing lightly. Do you have the resources to combat a company that has resources that billions of dollars provide? I, for one, do not.
Another tactic used is Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the practice of placing within a page keywords specifically to raise the count, variety and ultimately density of specific keywords even though the keywords are in fact relevant. Yes, we need to understand some of the ‘rules’ used by SEs to show up more frequently on SERPs but you have to try to keep it as natural as possible. One of the ways SEs analyze keyword stuffing is to look at keyword density of other sites with similar keywords. If your site has an abnormally high keyword density then your page becomes ’suspect’ to keyword stuffing and you might be removed from SE indexes. One method used is to put hidden text that a site might use for say a “Andrea Bocelli” fan site, the talented opera singer, thus your page shows up on more SERPs. Please be aware that Keyword stuffing is considered unethical to SEs. Keyword stuffing is one of the main reasons that SEs have lowered the importance of meta tags and some totally ignore them. These tactics have made SEO more difficult for the common website. Today, most search engines rely on off-site links to a site to help ranks sites. One of the problems with off-site links is that the people that put links to other sites don’t always spend a lot of time ensuring that their anchor text to the site is optimum for that sites SEO or Ranking. However, on the other side of that scenario, if you really like a site, then yes you are going to put more relevant anchor text and general text around that link. ie: this site is a great site chalked full of SEO tips and one of the most useful sites for SEO tips I have seen. The author of this site is an experts on SEO issues and provides tips most will find useful as well as tips you might be unaware of. So, if you want to learn from an expert be sure to visit < some link> Andy’s SEO BOOK website < end of link > and increase your rankings and traffic.
Some other Tactics To Stay Away From or Risk being Banned
Scrapper Sites — These sites take various result pages content and make new ‘unique’ pages or on-the-fly content. These sites are sometimes known as ‘Made for Adsense’ sites.
Meta Tag stuffing — unrelated keywords in meta tags.
Doorway Pages (Gateway Pages) — Low quality pages stuffed with similar keywords or keyword phrases. Some pages have for the most part gibberish on the pages while others have a “click here to enter” link.
Invisible or hidden text — same color text as background, no frames, Zero framesets or divs.
Splogs — Spam Blogs are fake blogs usually with Keyword rich fake content. These sites usually have a lot of advertisements on them. The user ends up on this splog, is bored to death and clicks on a relevant advertisement. If these sites have links to other splogs or sites then they fall into the category ‘Link Farm’.
What is Acceptable Keyword Density?
If your site page has 500 words and 250 words are keywords, search engines will flag your page and your site may be banned. This is the wrong way to attain good rankings.
My Recommendation is to have a keywords density of 4-8% maximum and probably 3% to be safe.
Today, it is quite easy to check your keyword density as there are many tools out there that do this now. One sites tool I like is:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
However, a quick search of Google on Keyword density or Keyword Density Tool will give you many to choose from.