Traffic Building

SEO Myth : A certain keyword density is key to search engine rankings.

In the days when search engines were young and the calculations they used to categorize web pages were primitive, keyword density was an important factor in ranking well for a particular search term. The idea being that the more often a certain keyword (or version of a keyword) appeared on a web page, the more relevant that web page was for that term.

Once this predilection became known, webmasters started to stuff their web pages with multiple versions of the keyword they were trying to rank for in an effort to artificially inflate the value of the page in a search engine’s results.

As with any “quick and easy” path to good rankings, the efficacy of this keyword stuffing approach quickly diminished as more webmasters began using it and aggravating search engines with their attempts to manipulate search results.

So, if including a keyword once doesn’t get your page ranked and including it a hundred times may trigger a penalty from a search engine, what is a natural occurance? Five times? Ten times?

Enter “ideal keyword density”.

For the past few years, the generally accepted value was around 8% of your content. In other words, if you have 100 words in your web page content (the actual text of your site), 8 of those words should be versions of the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Granted, this was simply an educated guess from observation of which pages were ranking well for certain keywords but it was accepted enough across the industry to at least be close to truth.

So why is keyword density now a myth?

Without getting into how a search engine figures out what a web page is about or the other factors that influence page rank, suffice to say that it’s entirely possible that a page can be absolute gibberish to a human reader and still get credit for having a certain keyword density while having no relevance for that keyword at all.

Keyword density is still too easy to manipulate and search engines tend to avoid giving weight to any factors that are easy to manipulate.

The front runner for phasing out keyword density is concept density via latent semantic indexing but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Just realize that optimizing your pages for some magic keyword density at the expense of naturally written content is quickly losing any positive affect it may have had for helping your pages rank well.