What’s The Optimum Keyword Density for Better Ranking?

Aug 14, 2018 Sam Makwana SEO & SEM 0

The fact that SEO entails very many things make it appear very difficult for some marketers. For instance, it includes;

Keyword Research
Outgoing links
On-page optimization
No follow tags, and much more…

Why don’t we just post content instead of bothering about our visibility on search engines?

Unfortunately, search engines use mathematical formulas and it’s your duty to help them comprehend your content and website. You must carry out search engine optimization, to be more visible and hence get more traffic.

The good news is:

SEO isn’t difficult at all.

If you have the right study material and can afford to spend a few hours, then understanding SEO basics is very easy. Consider using options like the WordPress SEO, etc. for more information.

Today we shall elaborate on one crucial aspect of SEO: Keyword Density.

The Meaning of Keyword Density in relation to SEO can be defined as follows:

“Keyword (KW) density is the ratio of the total number of times a target KW occurs on a website page to the total number of words in that web page”.

For example, if you have a piece of content of 200 words and the KW appears

20 times, then you have a KW density of 10%. There are, however, different formulas for calculating KW density, but the most common is:

“Total number of keyword occurrences divided by the total number of words multiplied by 100”.

Do not be surprised to find several others that give the same result.

So What is the Importance of Putting Keywords into a Page?

Well, the basic idea is to help the search engine robots better understand and thus rank your website for those keywords.

Of late, the role KW plays has reduced in significance when compared to site authority and quality. This, certainly doesn’t imply that KW density does not matter at all in SEO. It does matter, in fact, it is one of the things you should be focusing on while performing on-Page SEO.

According to Google, What Percentage of Keyword Density is considered Ideal?

One common myth is:

“If I use my KW many times, then the search engines will rank my site higher in the SERPs”.

The truth is doing this can actually back fire because search engines will consider your site to be KW spammed, and proceed to penalize you for over optimizing it. There is no precise or ideal percentage of keyword density to achieve the desired organic ranking.

At Traffic radius we maintain 1% – 3% KW density in addition to LSI and semantic keywords and this works fine for us. Google suggests creating natural content. Therefore, while there is no perfect percentage, using your keyword naturally in your article will work best.

Strive to retain a good KW density percentage that looks natural and does not create an impression that you have stuffed the web page with keywords. Getting the help of freelance writers also comes with its own challenges. For instance, businesses often say that:

“We once requested a content creator to write an article on a three-word KW. He used the KW 12 times and the article looked like a massive piece of spam.”

There are very many tools online that you can use to determine the KW density. Whichever you settle for, just make sure that your KW density is about 1.5%.

The next question is where should the KW be? You can place keywords in your:

Permalinks
H1 tags
Meta title tags
H2 tags
The beginning of the page

Next, you can use appropriate images and make the target KW your anchor text.

Remember you must not stuff your page with keywords just to increase the KW density. On the contrary, add value to your content to increase its usefulness.

Incorporate slides, videos and any other media tools to make your page not only presentable but also helpful.

Key Note:

While KW density is beneficial, stuffing can be misguiding, so

Content should appear natural
Highlight by italicizing and bolding the keywords and other crucial semantic KWs
Alter your KW throughout your content
Utilize LSI KWs
Make use of WordPress SEO plugin (or any other online tool) to establish your KW density

Note that, search engines place a lot of importance on the following factors to get your website ranking higher organically:

The usefulness of your page
How educative it is
The number of social signals your site is getting
The number of inbound links to your site

Google considers hundreds of signals when ranking websites. Evidently, one of them is KW density. You have to learn how to do it right to attain your dream ranking on search engines. If you execute KW density well you will get positive results, but if you do it wrong it will cost you dearly.

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