With over 10,000 new websites created every hour, it can sometimes be easy to become obsessed with the minutia of optimizing your websites, like keywords and their density.
Keywords are essential for your search engine optimization strategy (SEO). Understanding how they work and how to use them effectively is a large part of what an SEO manager will do every day. But what is keyword density, and why does it matter?
If you are looking at your approach to using keywords, you may be wondering about these very questions. In which case, you should keep reading as we take a detailed look at how keyword density impacts your digital strategy.
What is Keyword Density?
Keyword density defines how many keywords you can find in a single article or web page online. It is measured by the ratio of keywords to other text on the page. Sometimes the keyword density is given as a percentage and sometimes as a whole number, as there is a keyword density formula for calculating this.
It is a concept that has been around since the early days of digital marketing before people fully understood how to optimize content for SEO. At that time, keyword density in SEO was a pivotal strategy for getting a good place in the rankings.
Website managers and content writers employed a method called keyword stuffing to get keywords into every part of their web pages. This was because, at the time, keywords were one of the very few ranking signals that Google used to rank pages. If you had the most keywords for a search term, you would likely rank higher than others.
Thankfully, those days are gone as Google now uses a much more semantically designed algorithm. In fact, keyword stuffing is a technique that will get you penalized and lose ranking as a result.
How To Use Keyword Density Today
These days Google offers no advice on using keyword density on a page. As with many of their algorithmic rules, they are kept hidden from users, and we can only guess what they may actually be. However, they strongly advise against overusing keywords in any article or artificially stuffing them into other elements.
The advice given by the majority of SEO managers is that you should not have more than one keyword per 200 words of related text. This is purely a benchmark, and if you use the keyword more than once per 200 words, you are unlikely to get penalized. If you are concerned, you can use a keyword density checker online to see how often you use a keyword.
One of the better techniques to adopt is using keyword variants instead. As Google search is semantic, they assess your web content for a theme, not individual words. Therefore the more related keywords you can use, the better, as this will tell Google more about the subject of the copy.
Don’t Stress About Keyword Density
Hopefully, this article has answered the question of what is keyword density for you. Try not to stress too much about how many or how few keywords you use in your content. Instead, focus on writing good quality and engaging content that your users will enjoy, which will help your SEO strategy in the long run.
If you found this article helpful and would like to read more related topics, please take read other articles on search engine optimization on our site.
