Winning in keyword density is one of the key goals of any search engine optimization project. Search engines have become more intelligent over the past years that previous practices of simply peppering a web page with keywords or key phrases no longer helps to make a website rank. What matters most now is putting just the right amount of keywords or phrases in a web page in consideration of its content. Simply put, effective SEO nowadays entails achieving the right mix of keywords and other words in a page’s content.

What exactly is keyword density? Going by its most basic definition, the term refers to the ratio of  the number of keywords or key phrases to the total word count in an article or web page. Density of keywords can be easily derived mathematically by dividing the number of keywords or phrases in a given page by the total number of words and multiplying the quotient by 100 to get a percentage. For instance, the keyword density of a page with five keywords and a total of 500 words is 1%. A density of 1% is actually not recommended because it is considered to be too low. This ushers in the topic of what the density or web articles should actually be.

Just right

What is the “just right” density of keywords for an article to be published on the web? We’ll get to that later. First, you must understand why it is important to get the right keyword density.

Most search engines rank websites according to how relevant they are to a particular keyword or key phrase. The number of keywords in a website is one of the major factors used in determining such relevance. This means that if a particular page has too little keywords, there is a high chance that it would rank lower. Similarly, a very high keyword density can negatively affect a page’s ranking. At the very extreme, page with high keyword density may be banned by the search engine because of spamming. It is important, therefore, to maintain a balanced ratio of keywords and total word count when writing content for web pages.

So what’s the magic formula? SEO experts recommend that about 2 to 3% is the ideal keyword density to gain a higher search engine position and drive more traffic to a website. Moreover, this should be carefully followed for all individual pages of the website to guarantee a good search engine rank.