Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important part of a website, the techniques of the SEO makes the website optimized for the search engines, and the optimized website is crawled, indexed and ranked better. There are two parts of the SEO – On-page SEO and Off-page SEO (Read more: Types of SEO note for admin: link the existing article here…).
Before 2011, when the search engines rank the webpage based on the defined keywords in the Meta keyword tag. But, after that search engines started looking the keywords in the webpage’s content to understand how the page content is relevant to the targeted keywords. This was the reason; the term “Keyword Density” came in the field of Search Engine Optimization.
“Keyword density is the part of the on-page SEO technique, which defines the frequency of a keyword/phrase in the content.”
To rank any webpage in the search engine searches, keyword density plays a very important role (note: it is not the only factor to rank a webpage in search engines). When we optimize a page for the SEO, it is important that you should know, “how many times a targeted keyword/phrase should be repeated?”
Let suppose, if a webpage has 200 words content and you used targeted keyword/phrase 30 times, search engines may consider it as keyword stuffing and the page may not rank. Therefore, it is important that a targeted keyword/phrase must be repeated a limited number of times, which can be defined by the keyword density.
In this article, we will learn what is the keyword density? How many times a keyword should be repeated and what is the importance of a good keyword density for SEO?
What is Keyword Density?
According to Wikipedia
“Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.”
What should be the percentages of a targeted keyword/phrase in a webpage?
Since there is no fixed percentage for the targeted keyword/phrase defined by the search engines. But, according to the many SEO experts and SEO websites: The percentage of a good keyword density is 1 to 3. The density of the keywords within this range is considered as “Optimal keyword density”
For example:
If a webpage has 600 words content, keyword density should be 6 (1% of 600 words) to 12 (3% of 600 words) i.e. in 600 words article you can use targeted keywords (especially long-tail keyword) 6 to 12 number of times.
Why keyword density is important?
If you are optimizing a webpage for SEO, there must be a limit for repeating the targeted keywords, if you ignore the limit and use keywords multiple times without considering the length of the content and relevancy of the content on which you are optimizing the page.
Google or other search engines may consider that you have written the content to make their crawlers fool and search engine crawlers will consider it as keyword stuffing. And a webpage with multiple times repeated keywords may not rank.
So, it is important that you must go with the SEO experts, their suggestions and do not try to manipulate the search engines to rank that particular page that may not have good content and keywords stuffing. Use the targeted keywords in a genuine way by having optimal keyword density (1% to 3% of the content).
Importance of good keyword density for SEO
A good keyword density helps a lot to get good ranking in search results, as we know that “content is the king” in SEO because content matters a lot for the readers and search engines as well. But, you are providing content without optimizing it, it is nothing your readers may get benefit from it but if the page is not ranking. There is no way to generate more traffic on the pages.
So, it is highly important and recommended that the content must be optimized for the search engines and “Keyword density” is also an important factor for on-page SEO purpose. After removing the Meta keyword tag, search engines crawl the headings and the content and you must repeat the targeted keywords/phrase a limited number of times which I have written above. Less and more density of the keywords directly affects the SEO.
How does a good keyword density help in SEO?
The main aim of doing SEO on the content is to rank the webpage in search engines to gain organic traffic from the search results and to reach more audiences. Here I am writing some of the points, that can help you understand the importance of a good keyword density for the SEO, the points are:
- In an article, if you target long tail and relevant keyword/phrase with a good keyword density. It will help to rank the webpage on higher position quickly.
- If the pages started ranking, your website will start generating organic search traffic, which directly affects the website authority.
- However, the main important role of content is to provide helpful content to the readers so that they can gain benefit from it. If you optimize the content with a good keyword density with the targeted keywords/phrase, it will help to reach more audience through the search results.
- Using keywords in the content is not only the factor in SEO. Optimal keywords/phrase density tells to the crawlers that how relevant a webpage’s content to the targeted keywords/phrase.
If, you are really series for optimizing the content. There are some rules, which you should follow while placing the targeted keywords in the content:
1) Use long tail keywords
You should target long tail keywords while maintaining keyword density in the content. A long tail keyword may help to rank the webpage on more than one keyword and your webpage may generate more traffic.
2) Relevancy of the keywords
Keywords/phrase on which you are optimizing the webpage must be relevant to the topic. Keywords that are placed in the content should not be different from the content. It may cause to do not rank the page and may penalize your webpage.
On some of the local and poor authority based websites, you may see that they use repeating keywords many numbers of times. The page may rank for few days but the ranking will not be constant for a long time.
Therefore, to keep the ranking position same, it’s important that while maintaining the keyword density, you must make sure those keywords/ phrases are relevant to the content.
3) Analyse the keyword density with the keyword analyzer tools
There are a number of free and paid online tools that can be used to analyze the keyword density in the content.
You may use these tools to analyze the density of the keywords and serve the good and optimized content to the Reader and Search engines as well.
4) Avoid keywords stuffing
If you wrote a good article, repeating keywords many numbers of time and thinking that this may the correct way to rank on the keyword. This is totally wrong and you must avoid such kind of keywords stuffing at all cost.
5) Optimal keyword density
As I have written above that there is no defined particular number for placing targeted keywords but according to the many SEO experts – you should keep it between 1% to 3% of the written content in a webpage.
Conclusion
Since there are many factors for ranking on the higher position in the search engines. Keywords density is also an important factor to reach higher position in the search results. So, the keyword density should be optimal (1% to 3%), relevant to the webpage content, do not try to make the crawlers fool by repeating the keywords again and again.
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