Keyword density is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization because it affects the rankings of web pages. Google, Bing and other Search engines use keywords to find the most relevant results for the search queries entered by the users.
What is Keyword Density?
Keyword density is the ratio of how many times your focus keyword or key phrase appears on the web page against the total number of words exist on the same page. It is generally described in percentage.
How Keyword Density is Calculated?
You can calculate it by doing the following math: divide the number of times a keyword occurs by total number of words and multiplied the result by 100. For example, if an article contains 1000 words and keyword appears 20 times, then the density will be 2%.
Keyword Density Formula
What is the correct formula for knowing keyword density? You can find many formulas on the internet but I will advise you use the most accepted one (given below).
Keyword Density = Number of Time Keywords Appeared * 100/Total number of words
One other formula you might find on the Internet:
(Number of characters in a keyword*number of times the keyword occurs) *100/Total number of words.
Is keyword density still important in 2018?
A search engine is nothing but an algorithm, it has to crawl millions of pages daily, and matching keywords can help it in finding the correct page for a search query. Nowadays, keyword density importance is a lot less than what it used to be 10 years ago. At that time, keyword spamming was quite popular among online marketers. Google has evolved now and you cannot rank a page just by putting your focus keyword excessively in the content. Google Panda update was introduced years ago to penalize overly optimized and low quality content websites.
What is the ideal keyword density percentage?
No one can exactly tell how much keyword density is good for SEO because nobody knows. As per the best SEO practices, optimal keyword density should be around 2.5% with 2 being minimum and 3 is the upper limit. You must remember that Google might penalize your website for putting too much exact match keywords (popularly known as keyword stuffing). Avoid placing too many keywords if your domain name is newly registered since it has no authority and trust.
How to optimize on-page keyword density?
To improve on-page keyword density, your website’s title, meta description, H1 tag, ALT tag and of course your page content should have the key phrase you want to rank for in Google or Bing search. In order to rank better in search engines, you must also include synonyms and related words to your main keyword because most search algorithms are based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Since this approach is based on finding the actual meaning of words and phrases it is much better than just matching keywords.
Online Keyword Density Checker
There are various tools available online where you can check the keyword density of a web page or for a piece of text. I am listing below some of the bests available on the internet.
SEO Review Tools Keywords Checker – In my opinion, it is the best tool for analyzing keywords on a page. It lists single words as well as all the important two and three words phrases. This tool also warns you if a word or phrase is exceeding the limit of max keyword density.
Small SEO Tools Checker – it also shows all single words and phrases both in its results.
Webconfs Density Checker – It only tells density of each and every single word that appears, unfortunately, not for the phrases.
In conclusion, optimize keyword density by putting relevant words and phrase in content and meta elements that should help search engines present it to the right searchers.
If you still have any doubt, please comment below, I will try my best to clear it.
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