What is keyword density and why is it important?
Keyword density, one element of search engine optimization, is the ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a web page. In other words, it's the number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page.This measurement is used by search engines to help determine the "strength" of "value" of a particular web page for a given keyword.
If a given keyword or phrase is used 5 times in a web page with 100 words of text in the page, the keyword density is 5%. What is an optimal keyword density? We see numbers ranging from 3% to 11%.
How important is keyword density to Google? Not very. Try a Google search on the words "click here". The top result will be the download page for Adobe's Acrobat Reader. Go ahead and load that page, view the source code, and search for the number of occurrences of the phrase "click here". You won't find it at all -- it has a keyword density of zero. The reason that this page ranks #1 on Google for this phrase is because over a million web pages contain a link to this page using the anchor text "click here".
With Google, anchor text of inbound links is MUCH more important than keyword density.
Created: 02/28/2006; Updated: 04/27/2006
