Search Optimization School

Keyword density and SEO go hand in hand. The search crawler has so many things to figure out when visiting your page and relevancy. The Google algorithm wants to know that you’re not a spammer, or trying to manipulate the rankings in any way. Sometimes they’re really good at this, other times – not so good. Every time they do any update to keep people from gaming the rankings, people find new loopholes and ways to game the engine.

Learning SEO is something that you learn in chunks, and I firmly believe that the more “bullets” you have in your arsenal – the more successful you’ll be overall. It’s important that you have the right keywords in the right places, but it’s also important that you don’t “overuse” them. That’s where keyword density and SEO come into play.

How keyword density and SEO works

Keyword density is a percentage of the total words you use in a post. Let’s say you had a short post of only 180 words, and had used a two word phrase 5 times in the textual content. Your “keyword density” could be 5.37%. Remove the “stop words” (common words like the, and, or – etc) and it might double to 10% or more.

If you’re writing articles to seed the search engines with original content, not learning about keyword density is like throwing away opportunities. Also, if you think you’re going to dominate search with 100 word posts that use your target keywords 5 times, that’s not going to work either.

Keyword Density and SEO Rules of Thumb

Here are some great rules of thumb to use when writing posts and pages for your web site.

• Write effective SEO titles (see yesterdays post)
• Write great original content with 400-800+ words per page
• Use images optimized with your keywords on each page (see post from 2 days ago)
• Keep the density for your target keyword phrase to 3-5% per page
• It’s best not to target more than one main keyword phrase per page, but if you must, try and keep it down to 2-3 phrases

There are online tools that you can use to generate keyword density percentages after your pages are published. Personally, I haven’t found these to be so reliable – but they are free.

You could also try the free wordpress plugin keyword statistics. You can set it up to use stop words (or not), and it will give you a pretty good picture of what your score is. I don’t like the fact that it only shows you keyword density and a percentage. It won’t tell you anything about headings or images at all.

The most professional keyword density tool I’ve seen to date is SEOPressor – which is a premium (but VERY affordable) plugin for WordPress. It gives you a keyword density score, and keeps track of all the areas that you’ve used your target keyword (headings, images, meta, etc.). If you’re serious about your rankings, that’s what I would use. I’ve been using it on all of my sites with good results for the last few months.