Keyword density is the term you will hear and most SEO Experts are centered while creating content and when it comes to ranking your blog/website in a search engine like Google.
There is no doubt that when you start to create content, you need your primary keyword. On the basis of that primary keyword, you have to do keyword research and write your content. You are going to rank your blog/website at the top position of the search engine with that focus keyword.
But how do you know that:
how many keywords are enough?
What is the ideal keyword ratio on a blog post or web page?
How many keywords are too many?
Should there be a good keyword density percentage in your blog/website?
Does it really matter in the blog/website ranking?
What is the impact of keyword density on your SEO?
You are going to get answers to all these questions in this blog post. You will learn in this blog post about the keyword density basics and whether it really matters in your blog ranking or not.
First this first, let’s start with understanding the keyword. You may already know what is keyword. But it is a good step to take to understand keyword density and its effect on your blog/website ranking. So, if you already know, take it as a revision of your knowledge.
Table of Contents
What is a keyword?
Do you know the fact that Google handles over 5 billion searches per day? Every single day, 15% of those searches are completely new.
The searches the searcher use in search engines like Google the keyword in terms of SEO. In other words, a keyword is a word that describes your page content or post content. It’s the word that you want to rank for with a certain page or post. So, when searchers search for that keyword or key phare in search engines including Google. They would find that post or page on your website.
Search query/searcher intent/search term/primary word/seed word/focus word, you name it all are other terms for a keyword. That is why, when it comes to keywords, it doesn’t mean it is only one word. It could consist of multiple words, it could be a phase, it could be in the form of a question, etc.
Keywords are very important in terms of SEO and USER. With the keywords, you have included in your content, Google and other search engines get a clue about what your page or post is about. In the same way, when you use the right keywords that match what your potential audience is searching for. You get a high chance of landing your target customers on your post or page.
What is keyword Density?
The keyword density definition is quite simple. It is the number of times your primary keyword is used on your webpage or content relative to the page’s total word count.
Keyword density also known as keyword frequency is usually expressed in the form of a percentage and/or ratio. For example: if you use the keyword 10 times in a 1000 – words piece of content. Your keyword density would be 1%. The keyword density percentage does not only count for your keyword. It is the same process to calculate your key phare or long-tail keywords. Whether it is a keyword or keyword phrase doesn’t change the measurement.
Source: SEO
Keyword Density Calculator, the Formula
The formula to calculate the keyword density on your content is simply straightforward. You have to look at just a few things to calculate your keyword density:
- How many times a specific keyword/key-phrase is repeated in a content
- The total number of words in your analyzed text
The simple formula is:
Divide the number of times a keyword/key phrase you have used on your page by the total number of words on the page. Then multiply by 100 to get in percentage.
i.e., Keyword Density = (number of times the keyword or key-phrase appears/total number of words) x 100
Here is an example from the above with a proper calculator or Formula.
Keyword Density = 10/1000 x 100 = 1%
There is another formula too, which is a more advanced one and used to assess keyword usage. That is TF-IDF.
The acronym stands for “Term frequency and inverse document frequency.” This advanced formula is all about assessing the frequency of a keyword on specific pages (TF) against the number of times this word appears across multiple pages on your site (IDF). The result helps determine how relevant your keyword is for specific pages.
The resulting formula has become a standard in data mining, user modeling, information retrieval, and of course search engines. It is not sure whether search engines including Google uses the variation of TF-IDF in their algorithm.TF-IDF is a safe bet for simpler vertical search engines to determine relevance. That is for sure.
What is the ideal/right keyword density for SEO?
You can see some more questions related to the above question below.
How many keywords are enough?
What should be keyword density Ratios?
How many keywords are too many?
What is good Keyword density?
Is there an ideal keyword density?
What is the ideal keyword density?
Only the format of the questions is different but the answer to these questions will be the same.
So, let’s get the answer…….
There are a lot of conflicting opinions on the ideal keyword density percentage. When it comes to keyword density, there are no clearly defined fast and hard rules. There is no guideline from search engines like Google that tell you exactly how many keywords a piece of content should contain. You also won’t find any specific figure or statistic you can rely upon that governs how many keywords should or should not appear on your page or post.
When it comes to how many keywords are enough or how many keywords are too many, it really depends on the length of the content.
According to HubSpot, approximately 1-2 keywords for every 100 words of copy. Most SEO experts believe the ideal keyword density is 1-2%.
General wisdom holds that Google and other search engines respond well to keyword density around 0.5%.
Yoast SEO recommends that the ideal keyword density range is 0.5% to 3%.
Of course, you should not ignore the optimal keyword density in your content for ranking. But rather than aiming for an exact percentage, you should always be to create high-quality content that offers an amazing user experience. Use the keyword density as an objective guidepost for your content. Here are a few keywords density best practices:
- Ideal keyword density differs from page to page, phrase to phrase.
- Avoid demotion in Google by avoiding repeating keyword phrases in the text content.
- There is no single best keyword density to rank high in search engines.
- Write naturally and include the keyword phrase once or twice on the page
- Focus on creating high-quality engaging content instead
- Measure and benchmark the keyword density for the top-ranking content in Google for your target keyword phrase
- As you build out the topical focus of each page, map out a few keywords that are contextually or semantically related to your target keyword (synonyms, variants, closely related topics, etc. ) and work these into your content
- You can also reference the keyword density for your own top-ranking content for similar topics.
Does keyword density really matter in the blog ranking/SEO?
“Keyword density, in general, is something I wouldn’t focus on. Search engines have kind of moved on from there” – John Mueller, Google 2014.
This is the quote from John Mueller, who worked with Google from 2000 to 2015 as the head of Google’s web spam team. He has clearly said that when you identified the keywords you want to use and rank, you should write your content that is long enough to work those keywords into the copy in a natural way.
To understand whether keyword density really matters in blog ranking and SEO. You have to go back to the early days of SEO. Back in the wind west days, search engine crawlers were simply advanced library card catalog systems. The search engines including Google needed a way to get users the information they were looking for.
So, the search engines used each site’s metadata as a “file tab” in their catalog. Whenever the website owners update the file tab with their primary keywords, search engines get help to organize the site into the right place in their index.
Back then, keyword density was used to provide a measurable, objective way for search engines like Google to understand what each page in its index was about. If searchers searched a particular keyword and a website’s keyword frequency was high for that keyword, search engines used to assume that the website was a good fit for the user.
Then some marketers and SEO specialists try to game the system by overloading the primary keywords on their content exploiting the search engines like Google’s well-intentional rules. This exploitation process is known as keyword Stuffing.
What is keyword stuffing?
“The practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.” —– Google
Keyword stuffing is the practice of cramming as many keywords as possible on a webpage in a way that feels forced and unnatural to the readers. As already mentioned above, early days when SEO was young and just an emerging discipline, the keyword stuffing technique was very popular.
Source: Google
Although this practice of keyword stuffing is taken as a Black Hat SEO tactic and penalizes the site by search engines, back then many SEO professionals used this technique to manipulate the search engine and effortlessly rank on the first page of Google results for virtually any keyword you could imagine.
Along the way, search engines have developed and updated their search engines with advanced algorithms and advanced Al systems to end keyword stuffing by detecting and penalizing the keyword-stuffed websites and start indexing more semantically. Google found that the practice of keyword stuffing is not good for their users because:
- The content is not audience targeted
- The purpose of content is not organizational and cohesive.
- Keywords are used too much for content that makes no sense
- It is not user–friendly. It makes inhuman or robotic
- It is not valuable and shareable
- It manipulates the good intentional rule of the search engines
In this way, SEO becomes far more about creating engaging and informative content than the number of times you use your primary keyword in your blog post or page. You should know that using keywords is important, obsessing over keyword stuffing and density to hit a certain ratio or percentage won’t help your blog ranking and SEO.
Does that mean keyword density matters nothing?
Of course not, keyword density still matters in your blog ranking and SEO practices but it depends on how you use them in your blog post or page. It is not how many times you use your keyword that is important; it is how you use your keyword that is important. Your keyword frequency is not analyzed as a single metric anymore.
The concept of keywords is still valuable. Keywords are an integral part of SEO. They are the ones that tell search engines what is your content about, so the search engine can know where to display it in search results. When Google’s bots scan your copy to find your focus keywords, it will skip the terms of normal everyday language and search for potential keywords that stand out in your content. That is why, you should have a primary keyword that takes up a certain percentage of all words on your post or page i.e., your keyword density.
But you should find your niche or subject that your average user might like to read about or search for and build content topics around those subjects, rather than selecting a handful of keywords to hammer into your content.
When you sufficiently detailed and answered your users’ questions and queries completely. It will be much more algorithmic weight than the number of times your primary keyword is used in your content. In this way, you will naturally rank for your blog post and page.
Besides writing the user intent, user-friendly valuable original content. You can also optimize your content for SEO and ranking without repeating your focus keywords over and over again in your content.
Keyword variants
Keyword variants are slight variations on a given keyword. Because keyword targeting is still one of the best SEO techniques for ranking your blog post and page. You should consider on-page SEO in terms of keywords too.
To create SEO-friendly original content that ranks high on SERP of SEO keywords. There are two types of SEO keywords you need to know about.
- Primary keyword: This is the main focus keyword of your content that you want to use and rank for.
- LSI keyword: LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are variations or synonyms of your primary keyword that can be used to optimize your content. LSI keyword provides context to search engines to better understand your content.
Source: seobuddy
In the same way, you can use also plural and singular versions, abbreviations, synonyms, and co-occurring phrases of your primary keywords in your content to optimize for SEO and ranking. Google’s algorithms can recognize the different variations of the same search but you must be careful when using them so it won’t look like keyword stuffing.
Adding FAQs related to the focus keyword you want to use and rank will help search engines including Google to easily recognize your content. This way, you can make it clear that your content is created to give the most information and answers possible to your audience.
If you are still not sure about the keyword variants. You can use the “searches related to” section at the bottom of Google’s SERP for your focus keyword. It will show you similar terms to your primary keyword.
Factors weight than Keyword density:
- Include your keyword in the header and title tags
- Keyword usage in the URL/Domain
- Frequency and spread of your keyword throughout the post/page
- Include your keyword in image alt-text
- Make appear your keyword at the starting few sentences of the first paragraph
- Use similar words and synonyms throughout the post/page
- Keyword usage in the meta description of the page.
- The search engine analyzes each word on the post and page and gives it weight depending on its relevance and user-friendliness.
Keyword Density Tools
You have many tools available to check your keyword frequency – free and paid.
Here you may ask, you have already the formula. You have already known the calculation. Why do you need the keyword density checker tool and/or keyword density analysis tool to check your keyword frequency?
It will be helpful to know some of the best keyword density analyzer tools among the many. Because when you will grow your blog or website, there will be a load of pages/posts and it will consume time to calculate your keyword frequency on every page or post. At that time, you will need this kind of keyword density analysis tool.
If you are using WordPress for your blog/website. Then your tension to check the keyword density in your site is over. Because you have your best SEO plug i.e., Yoast SEO. This tool is your keyword density checker for free.
Yoast SEO is far more than just a keyword density checker. But it is a great way to get an instant read on your focus keyword density as you build out your content or page.
Along with Yoast SEO, here are some best keyword density tools:
- SEO Review Tools Keyword Density Checker
- SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer
- Semrush’s On-page SEO Checker
- Moz’s On-page Grader
- Internetmarketingninjas’ keyword Density analysis tool
- Webfx’s keyword density Checker
- Smallseotools’ keyword density Checker
- Seobility’s TF-IDF tool
- Websiteseochecker’s Keyword Density Checker
Final words
Through the blog, you have understood that there is no ideal keyword density, and search engines agree. Thus sometimes its impact is overrated but you should know that keyword density definitely has an impact on SEO and Blog ranking.
Instead of focusing on keyword frequency, you should focus on natural copy, creative content, the usefulness of the information, and better user experience because these are the future of your blog ranking and digital marketing.
Your top priority should always be creating high-quality content and a good user experience. you have learned that there is no proof that keyword density is still part of Google’s algorithm, but there is evidence that naturally including keyword varieties, long-tail keywords, LSI keywords, synonyms, etc., increases the relevance of your blog/website. you should know altogether that freshness, authority score, backlinks, social signal, on-page SEO, and brand presence carry much more algorithmic weight than the number of times your primary keyword is used in your blog/website.
To put it simply the impact of keyword density on your blog ranking and SEO plus how you should take it and how you should use it. Here is a video from the Google person Matt Cutts.
Did you get the impact of keyword density on your blog ranking and SEO?
Are you going to use them naturally with keyword variants on your blog post?
In which position did your blog rank with your focus keyword?
Let me know in the comment section. Also mention how this blog post helps you to rank your blog or website in that position.