35 replies to this topic

[Cathy Jones]

What should be the exact keyword density in a website?

[lee.n3o]

Well thats a hard one... I don't think anyone caan really give a definitive answer on that... I read this the other day and think its a great bit of advice

I can't specifically give an optimal keyword density in an article as there's a good chance it will be read months from now when the densities are different. The ideal way to calculate optimal densities is to figure out what the densities of the current top 10 are and target appropriately

Hope that helps

[A.N.Onym]

I am sure the topic has been covered before, but using Google didn't reveal anything solid.

Anyway, keyword density is for the machinery. You want to write content for your visitors.
That is, you write whatever you want for your visitors without taking keywords into account, then replace meaningless words (pronouns - it, that, who, etc) with your keywords. This way your website copy retains the original flow and has the right keywords.

Special attention should be paid to human-friendliness, so to speak. Make sure you can read the text without noticing it was written for the search engines.

The described keyword density should be the best variant for keeping your visitors interested, just as well the search engines.

[FP_Guy]

Keyword density still has an effect in MSN and Yahoo, but no longer is true in Google. I've seen rankings where the keyword was only mentioned twice. Once in the title tag and once in the alt tag.

Yahoo's keyword density from research done on April of 2006 showed that the top listings always fell between 1% and 8%. Anything more was dangerous for setting off spam filters.

MSN's keyword density from research done at about the same time showed that the top listings always fell between 3.5% to 4%. Outside of this area was forgiven, but not ignored.

[Respree]

I wouldn't pay too much attention to keyword density.
http://www.e-marketi...r05/garcia.html

http://www.cre8asite...showtopic=30722

[bwelford]

In addition, Google and possibly the other two biggies do semantic analysis. So they'll take account of synonyms of the keywords being searched for. There's no easy way for you to take that into your metrics.

[cre8pc]

And, remember when focusing on keyword density as a goal, this usually means the page will be frustrating to humans and especially infuriating to anyone with a screen reader.

[phaithful]

I still believe keyword density to be one of the ranking factors, but it's changed from just a simple percentage to more of what Barry is talking about:

Google and possibly the other two biggies do semantic analysis. So they'll take account of synonyms of the keywords being searched for.

Keyword density is really more of a metric for you to understand how to write more naturally for the user.

If you're looking for a number, run some keyword density reports on your competitors or well written articles. Then try and emulate that number... but remember you've got to emulate all the numbers for all the symantical keywords....

you're better of just writing a good article... use the above only if you know you're a bad writer or can't afford a good one

[send2paul]

Cathy - HI

Two keyword density tools:

1. Keyword Density and Position
2. Keyword Density Analyzer.

Use as guided in above posts, remembering that "normal" folks are the ones that count - not website spiders

Paul

[kestrel]

A piece of advice i was once given was to look at the top 10 results for your search term and measure their keyword density. You should then make yours the same or a touch higher.

This can all be ignored of course if you get enough inbounds.

K

[A.N.Onym]

Sorry to disappoint you all, but keyword density is considered a myth.

Some brain-picking proof by Dr. Garcia - Keyword Density of Non-sense.

To sum up, the assumption that KD values could be taken for estimates of term weights or that these values could be used for optimization purposes amounts to the Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

That being said, I'll happily dive for another school of thought if someone shows some real repetitive results, shown after the Big Daddy update.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 13 July 2006 - 03:40 AM.

[bwstyle]

Hey Guys, the KW density is most definitely a myth, I get some decent rankings and haven't even thought about KW density in years, there are so many other GOOD uses of your time I would hate to see you spend anything more than 1 minute looking at density analysis.

[Halfdeck]

According to a few of my test pages, high keyword density seem to still matter:

http://www.google.co...amp;btnG=Search

That being said, links trump on-page factors unless you're in a niche where no one is linking to each other.

[Black_Knight]

I recently did some testing in a highly competitive keyword area in making huge reductions to keyword density with no adverse affects at all to be seen. The site I'm testing with does not have huge numbers of links either.

However, it does have good keywords in the links it does have, and while those links are not especially high in PageRank (and most of the competition have more links) the links I do have are on quality sites that are spot-on relevant to the exact same keywords.

SEO just isn't the simple numbers game it used to be unless you talk about vast numbers. These days the numbers in the game are in terms of advanced mathematics used to measure quality and co-citation relevancy.

Afterthought

The beauty of such relevancy measures is that they will always defeat nonsensical and made-up words. Testing with nonsense phrases cannot test the performance of co-citation very easily, and cannot test the performance of relevancy, theme, or hubs/authorities at all. It really is quite beautiful in the way it makes most simplistic testing entirely self-deceptive with no effort at all.

[ukdaz]

Been offline for a week waiting for BT to get my broadbandline in... I have moved from Cambridgeshire to Wiltshiren(UK) so been very frustrated waiting for an internet connection...

OK back on topic...

I tend not to consider keyword density UNLESS my content seems to be quite repetitive when I read it back. Try using variations of similar keyword phrases (consider looking up semantics on Google) 1and utilise that in your content rather than aiming for a certain percentage of keyword density - I'd say KW density used to work but with the development of s/e algorithms...

Not only will the search engines prefer your content, more importantly so will your visitors for having interesting & refreshing content!

Daz

[Halfdeck]

I recently did some testing in a highly competitive keyword area

That's not surprising. If you're "testing" pages in a competitive niche (which isn't really a test in the first place since you got too many factors going on at once), I don't expect on-page tinkering to make a dent in the rankings. SEO for Google nowadays is all about links. It comes down to building valuable websites and increasing site visibility. Keyword density has no meaningful place in that process.

Testing with nonsense phrases cannot test the performance of co-citation very easily, and cannot test the performance of relevancy, theme, or hubs/authorities at all.

I agree there are obvious limitations to nonsense phrases - but then again, the results will be the same if the pages were in English. They're not testing co-citation, relevancy, theme, or anything else. Those particular pages are isolating how Google reacts to on-page optimization. What do the results tell me? If you're really worried about on-page optimization, tweak title tags and stuff your articles with keywords - imo a complete waste of time.

Any boost gained by higher keyword density is like a drop in the bucket compared to one link from a relevant, quality site. Keyword density is not a myth, but like all other textbook SEO tactics, the boost you get from on-page tinkering is minimal - unless you're trying to rank higher on MSN or building bottom fishing spam.

[yannis]

There are three myths here:

(01) You cannot write good copy if you have a high density of keywords. Yes you can.

(02) Keyword Density does not count. Yes it counts although not in a simplistic way.

(03) A high keyword density can hurt. Only if very excessive and repetitive. Keywords having a good distributiion up to 13% will not hurt you. Just do not stuff them next to each other.

A little experiment with a keyword density analyzer for new york hotels can substantiate most of the above statements.

Average keyword density for hotel was 4.7 % with the highest being 13.04%.York varied from 3.69% to 11.67%. If one counts semantically similar words the percentages are much higher. Most of the ten websites in the above SERPS are old websites with high pagerank and a high volume of quality backlinks.

Although I agree that one can get a good ranking without even the words appearing in the text, we cannot be sure that a bit of extra on-page optimization would have hurt! Since it is definitely proven that it cannot hurt, if used wisely, I would recommend the following:

(01) Keyword density 4.5 %.
(02) Add at least 2.0% semantically similar words.

In the early days of a website the keywords can give you a bit of an edge.

Yannis

PS Normally what I do. I just write the copy without any thought for keywords. I then test the keyword density and add sentences with the keywords in until I get close to 4-5%.

[phaithful]

very nice write up Yannis. I agree:

Yes it counts although not in a simplistic way.

Keyword density I still believe is one of those ranking factors, but since it's been exploited in the past, it has much much less value, but not dead altogether.

[Black_Knight]

Yannis, I won't say this in a way that allows everyone to see it, so instead I'm going to put this behind an IQ test

Looking at the highest ranking pages for an awful lot of SERPs will show you that the robots meta and the revisit-after tags are both highly effective. When you see why, you'll know that using a KWD analyser on pages probably built by people using a KWD analyser is a self-fulfilling prophect as sure as that of any classic Greek tragedy.

[bragadocchio]

What should be the exact keyword density in a website?

I'm not sure that keyword density is an approach that many search engines for the web have ever used to create their indices, but term weight may be what you are asking about.

These are fairly simple explanations of term weights compared to some of the other documents on the subject, but they aren't bad. The first one is jointly authored by people from Compaq, Google, and Altavista.

From The Term Vector Database: fast access to indexing terms for Web pages

How a Search Engine Works