By Angela Cammaert
The importance of keyword density and keyword research
SEO has changed dramatically over the past few years; Google demands a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy focused on every aspect of your website.
When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then solve the searcher’s query. The ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site is to the query.
When you use the right keywords and proper keyword density, you have a much higher chance of ranking on the SERP (search engine results page).
How to calculate keyword density?
Keyword Density
Keyword Density is the total number of times a keyword appears in the content on the page. The density is interpreted as the total number of target keywords plus secondary and LSI keywords used in the content. One of the most common questions about keyword density is the ideal keyword density percentage per page.
Keyword Density = (Nkr / Tkn) x 100
KR = how many times you repeated a key-phrases
NWK = number of words in your key-phrases
TW = total words in the analyzed text
Although there is no defined score for ideal keyword density, industry practices are 2% keyword density per 100 words and avoid shortcuts like keyword stuffing to gain higher rankings.
What is keyword stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is when a brand fills or ‘stuffs’ a webpage or landing page with the same target term to gain higher rankings on search engines.
Types of visible keyword stuffing include:
- Unnecessarily repeating words or phrases
- Adding words that are out of context
- Inserting blocks of the same Keyword
- Using keywords that are not relevant to the topic of the page
With the recent Google algorithm changes, keyword stuffing can hurt your rankings.
Using the right keywords and doing keyword research
Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, how can you effectively optimize your website; build target phrases for link building? Better yet, how do you know what content to develop and for what audience? Keyword discovery is often the most challenging part of the process. Often writers are unfamiliar with proper keyword analysis and will select broad words getting the site lost in the large search query.
There are several online tools to help you calculate your keyword density. Keyword density is not dead or outdated; it’s vital to your site’s SEO and should be the cornerstone of your entire SEO campaign.
Want to learn more about keywords, contact me for a site consultation.
Until next month,
Angela