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Why You Should Not Bother About Keyword Density

By Anne Moratis

We can find countless pages on the internet that tell about keyword density and what a good keyword density is. And many internet marketers spend a lot of time using keyword density checkers and keyword analysis tools to see if they have the right percentage of keywords on their web page or in their article. They don’t know that they are wasting their time. Keyword density does not matter, and here is why.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword appears on a page with respect to the total of words on this page. So if you write a 500 words article and your main keyword appears 5 times on the page, your keyword density for that particular keyword is 1%. In the 90s (remember Google did not even exist at the time), search engines algorithms weren’t as bright and sophisticated as they are now, and many experts say that search engines used to consider keyword density as one of their ranking factors. So webmasters and internet marketers began stuffing their keywords on their pages, with the intent to manipulate their search engine rankings. This of course led to abuses and poor quality content for the web surfer.

Today, search engines have sophisticated algorithms that totally ignore keyword density. Why? Because they have understood that this is not a good metric to measure the relevancy of a page to a search typed by a real person. Search engines rank pages based on totally different factors. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team, says it very well: "…we tend not to think much about keyword density here at Google, because our algorithms handle it pretty well…". And this is why you should not spend time putting your main keyword on your page so as to reach 1% or 3% or whatever so called best keyword density because it is completely useless.

However, we don’t want to be foolish either, and putting your main keyword at least twice in your article will surely help. You will do this naturally anyway. And putting related keywords will even help more, because by putting semantically related terms, you’re helping search engines understand what exactly your page is about. Let’s take the example of this article. If I do a search in Google for the related terms of the keyphrase keyword density, I find these: tool, analyzer, percentage, ideal, definition, checker, optimal, google, good, best, analysis, and so on. If I look at my article I see that so far I have naturally put 7 of these 11 words in it, and this is one of the elements that tell Google that my article is actually about keyword density.

To summarize, when writing articles or your website content, just focus on producing quality content that brings value to your reader. Don’t bother about how many times your main keyword is on the page, just put it in the title, the meta description and the body, and make sure you include some related terms in your article body, which you will do naturally if you write quality content.

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Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Anne. I can only hope that if I keep studying, I'll be able to put all of this into practice.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
Frederick

Thanks Frederick for commenting my intels, I appreciate. It takes some time to study, to digest what you study, but as far as you implement what you learn you're on the right track!

This is very helpful. I don't really think about keyword density until the end. I feel that with good content, invariably I will have reasonable keyword density and related keywords. I check my keywords when I'm editing and checking if the article flows well. Thank you for the intel.

I think you do it right. This is probably why we hear from experts that content is a big part of SEO, because good writing and content attracts natural links, which are given far more value by Google.

While your article is well-written, I just returned from PubCon and Cutts definitely said that 'the frequency of the keyword' as well as 'how close keywords are together' are 2 of the ~200 ranking factors in determining the relevancy of a page and it's ranking ability so I am afraid your assertion is incorrect or there are 2 Matt Cutts' out of sync with each other.

Thanks Heather for your input. I'm sure that keyword frequency is part of the 200 or so ranking factors, but what Cutts also said is they don't worry too much about it. I guess he means it is certainly not on top of the list of ranking factors but rather closer to the bottom of the list.

I would agree that the old way of thinking about keyword density is not as relevant anymore, but there is a thing called relative keyword density. This is what search engines use, amongst other factors, to analyze sites. For an example of relative keyword density at work, see this page.

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