By Janak Patel and Shreya Parmar
Keyword Density-Beginners Guide
Keyword density: A misunderstood concept
Remember the time when you used to play Lego? The toy consists of blocks that are played mostly by interlocking plastic bricks. Just like Lego, keywords are the building blocks of content. And SEO says that there should be a limit up to which you should use your keyword multiple times in your particular content. That is what Keyword Density is all about.
Now SEO is never going to die, it is actually going to expand because I don’t think people will ever stop searching things on Google or any other search engine, or maybe it will die when there are some catastrophic events and the whole world comes to end. Well maybe in the next generation; when my Kid’s kids’ kids are grown up and new tech will come up because AI is moving so fast that there won’t be any need to search for things and at that time there won’t be any need of SEO. Hence content creators are stuck with SEO for now and they should follow what SEO says regarding keyword density.
What is Keyword density?
We have learned from Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis Blog that Keywords should be related to our niche. Now your content should contain that keyword whether it is a Blog or a YouTube video. Because if your niche is with the food industry and you are writing about digital marketing it is not going to make sense. Here is where Keyword Density plays a role. Keyword Density is the total number of times a keyword appears in your content.
A more technical definition will be “Keyword density is a metric that tells us how often our keyword is used in our content per hundred words.” Keyword density is a percentage value that tells us how many times our keyword is repeated throughout the content. I have seen that most SEO experts agree that keyword density is an overrated concept that has never actually had any deeper significance in SEO. But I will tell you later on in this blog how keyword density plays a significant role in ranking your site high in Organic search.
How to calculate Keyword Density?
Here, there is an “inverse” relation of keyword values and use; lower values mean more keyword use. I am going to show you a little math for calculating Keyword density which is quite simple do not panic.
The classic formula will be:
Keyword density = (Keyword count/ Total no. of words) * 100
Where keyword count is the number of times keyword is repeated in whole content and Total no. of words means total word count of your content. For example, say you have a blog that is of length 1000 words and your keyword is repeated 10 times throughout the blog. Then your keyword density will be (10/1000) * 100 = 1.
Hence 1% is the keyword density of that particular blog.
If you increase the keyword count to 20, then keyword density will be 2%.
With more advanced ways of measuring result-driven SEO strategies in place, the TF-IDF technique has largely helped in calculating the Keyword Density. TF-IDF stands for “Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency.” This is a calculation based on the term frequency within the existing pages that are ranking on the search with that of the one you are about to publish.
What is ideal keyword density?
The optimal keyword density, together with SEO keyword analysis is one of the hot topics in the blog of any website related to Search Engines Optimization. Is there an ideal value for the keywords in a text that will help a website to rank better in SERP? Is it 0.1%, 1%, 11% or 111%? You will think if the focus keyword matters this much to Google why not make it maximum?
Keep in mind this is not how Google search works. This mentality might lead you to keyword stuffing, which is a bad thing actually. How Google search works are, it will go through your content line by line, and let’s say it finds a focus keyword is “Marketing”. Google will recognize that this particular blog is about marketing, let’s read on, and the way it will find another word named “Marketing”. Still okay, as we can infer that this article is still about marketing only. But if you have used the “Marketing” keyword dozens of times, of course, Google will get frustrated.
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You see it should look natural while reading it. Not just for the sake of describing that particular keyword, you will artificially stuff it anywhere anyhow in your content. Make sure it looks natural and less annoying. Some experts will tell you that the ideal keyword density is between 0.5% and 0.8%. Other sites will say anywhere between 0.5% and 2.5% is acceptable. Well, it depends upon content to content and it will change for different areas or fields you are concerned with. But in reality, take care that your keyword density stays lower than 3%.
History of Keyword density
There should be some time from where the concept of keyword density actually started. Before 2011, keyword inclusion in your content was nearly a certain way to succeed and ensure that your site is ranked for that particular keyword. We have seen from our blog Google Algorithm, The Panda update which targets ‘feeble and not-asked for content that did not help the end-user came and everyone started questioning whether density was still a thing; was it better to include that specific number of keywords, or focus on creating great, user-focused content?
It didn’t take Google long to catch on and take action. The Panda update penalized sites with thin content and an unusually high keyword density. But they didn’t throw away the keyword density metric altogether. They just created more advanced systems for spotting unnatural manipulation of the metric.
Then, they began to balance out their on-site factors with an off-site look at trust signals. Now, a number of trust and usability signals combine with a more in-depth understanding of search behaviour to determine a page’s relevance for a given keyword so that Google can give users the best possible experience with the highest quality content. I would rather say keyword density is in Google’s search algorithm only. It’s just much more complicated now.
Importance of Keyword Density for SEO
I started with one line: that keyword is the building block of your content. Because Google will only display results on top which have the most relevant keyword for the query entered by the user. As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on that particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increase almost exponentially. Not all search engines compute or evaluate keyword density in the same way and most have their own proprietary algorithm for calculating the average density of a keyword.
But that doesn’t mean that you will include more and more keywords multiple times. Do not follow keyword stuffing. Google is getting smarter every single day. The way search engines are showing search results is also changing (and improving). So if you’re someone who is still relying upon stuffing keywords by focusing on density, you’re doing it wrong. Sometimes, using the exact keyword multiple times within a piece of content may dilute the effectiveness of the entire article; therefore, what you can do instead is use synonyms of your focus keyword to avoid repetitiveness.
How is Keyword Stuffing different from Keyword density?
Like people, search engine bots are becoming smart these days. And right now if we are discussing keyword density, how can we not discuss keyword stuffing. So keyword stuffing is when you are stuffing keywords more than the demand. The over usage of keywords in content occurs when someone tries to fit as many keywords as possible in their content in false hopes that it will help to rank content better for that keyword. Pages with keyword stuffing often use the keyword in forced and unnatural phrasing.
It is quite good if you have knowledge regarding keyword stuffing because SEO hates it. SEO’s enemy is Black hat SEO, and keyword stuffing accounts in Black hat SEO; so better to stay away from that technique. Why hammer our own foot by going against Google’s standards. After all, Google is the one who is going to rank you high if you will follow proper SEO friendly techniques. The fact is that trying to use a keyword artificially only to reach a certain keyword density usually causes more harm than good. Follow the below-mentioned ways so that you stay away from stepping into keyword stuffing.
Best ways to optimize keyword density:
1. Choose a primary keyword with low competition. This will prevent your own content from competing against each other for a single keyword and keep your content unique.
2. To justify the relevance of your primary keyword another way is adding secondary keywords, LSI keywords, and long-tail keyword variations in the body copy.
3. As mentioned above, try keeping your keyword density around 2% to stay within the best keyword optimization practices laid out by Google.
4. Your content should look natural, not like you have artificially stuffed the main keyword more than the requirements.
5. Many companies make the mistake of trying to write to help their content rank in search engines. Instead of focusing on writing for search engines, focus on creating content for your audience.
Keyword density tools:
There are a few different SEO tools you can use to measure the best keyword density. I’ll prefer you to go ahead with Yoast. Because Yoast is far more than just a keyword density checker. So its recommendations won’t always make sense on a case-by-case basis. Overall, Yoast’s tool isn’t a perfect match for Google’s semantic indexing style. But it’s a quick and easy way to keep track of any individual goals you set based on your SERP research.
Hence at last I would say Keyword density is a misunderstood concept when we talk about keyword optimization mainly. But yeah, Keyword density is more like a GPS of your content, who will assign you the best way out.
