Website Optimization: Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the amount of times the chosen keyword appears in the web page. Nevertheless, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places within a sentence.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line too much, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed in a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

For example, suppose that you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you make use of a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is obtained through simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density will be between 3% and 5%, in order to get recognized by the search engines and you should never go beyond it.

You must always bear in mind, that this rule tends to apply to every page on your site. It will also apply to not just one keyword but also to a set of keywords that will then relate to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be in between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps towards checking the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program such as Microsoft Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Then, try to go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Then, select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you would like to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so that you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will then provide a count of the words that you have replaced. That will give the amount of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Making use of the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

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