Keyword Density; An Enduring SEO Myth

Keyword Density has become an often-misunderstood concept. In its pure form, keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears in relation to all of the other words on the same web page.

For instance, if a page only contained one word of text, say... Chicago, the keyword density for the word Chicago would be 100%.

On the other hand, if the only text on the page was...

Eat at Chicago's finest seafood restaurant

...then the keyword density of Chicago would be 20%, since each word on the page represents one-fifth of the entire text. By the way, search engine's ignore common stop words such as the, at, of, etc. – therefore the word at would not be included in our keyword density calculation.

Optimum Keyword density is one of the tactics that some search engine optimizers (SEOs) place way too much emphasis on. They're usually under the mistaken impression there is some "magic formula" for calculating the optimal keyword density that will appeal to each search engine. While this was true in the past, it has effectively ceased to be a factor anymore. At best, keyword density is only a bit-player in the big algorithmic search engine formula for top ranking pages and no longer worth the effort to factor into your strategies .

Regardless, you may still hear stories that Google prefers pages with a 5% keyword density or Yahoo likes pages with a 11% keyword density. There are a number of reasons why this is not an effective strategy for optimizing your web pages.

First of all, the concept of keyword density doesn't take into account the location of the keywords on the page. As you learned in the previous section, keyword placement is an important element of optimizing for search engine ranking. To say that a page has a 10% keyword density says nothing about whether those keywords are featured in your title tags, header tags, link anchor text, or any other of the important places to feature your keywords.

Secondly, keyword density also ignores the distance between keywords on a page, a concept known as keyword proximity. In general, the closer your keywords are to each other, the better. For instance, the phase:

Your premier resource for San Diego real estate information

...is better optimized for the keyword San Diego real estate, than the following phrase:

Your premier real estate information resource for the San Diego area.

And finally, our analytical research of top-ranking pages in any search engine shows an enormous variation in the keyword density of those pages. Some top-ranking pages have a 50% keyword density. Others have as low as 0% keyword density. Indeed, we've found a few pages that rank highly for a keyword in spite of the fact the keyword doesn't even appear on the page!

In such cases, it's the keywords in the anchor text of external site links that point to the page that's causing it to rank at, or near, the top. This alone illustrates just how important it is to get your keywords into the anchor text of offsite links pointing to your pages!.

As you might imagine, such a large degree of variation makes it all-but-impossible for anyone to determine just exactly what the "ideal" keyword density actually is. Restated simply, you should insert your keywords into the natural flow of descriptive text without wasting time stressing over the exact number of times a keyword should appear on a web page.

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