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Keyword DensityWhat is the best keyword density for a web page? This question comes up every now and then in many SEO forums and it seems like it is never really answered or understood. Everybody has their own ideas about what keyword density is and what the best density is. I used the
searchengineworld keyword density
analyzer and analyzed http://www.seo-works.com/index.html. This page has a total of 547 words. The following
words and phrases occur most: search has a density of 16/546 = 2.92 % That seems to make sense. Now lets see what the keyword density analyzer gives as a result: search has a density of 12.21 % ???????? What ???????? So many people assume that, for instance a density of 20 % means that 1 in every 5 words is a keyword. But by the results above we know that that can not be true. So what does the analyzer do different? The keyword analyzer follows a set of rules. For instance: All words of 3 characters or less are not counted. Also a standard stop word list is also not included. That leaves us with just 131 words in the copy that are actually counted. Out of these 131 the analyzer derives just 35 phrases of 2 words and just 13 phrases of 3 words. The percentages that it shows are within these groups of words, and not within the total number of words in the page. So: search has a density of 16/131 = 12.21 % Search Engines look at pages in a similar way because it gives more information about what the page is about than comparing to the total number of words. Search engines look at much more than just keyword density, but just as with PageRank, this is something people feel like they can measure. Unfortunately (or logically) there is no best or perfect density of keywords. It depends on how a page was constructed, and even something simple as the subject determines what is the best density. Look at: “Do a search in a search engine to find what the best keyword density is to get the best search results in a search engine” and compare that to “You don’t have to give water to a water plant because it already sits in water. If it doesn’t you need to plant it in deeper water.” Both sentences have about the same number of words, and the keyword (search / water) occurs 4 times in each sentence. But it is over done in the first sentence while in the second sentence it feels fine. Of course both sentences are not the greatest sentences, but they show that keyword density is a very relative thing. The important thing of all these density calculations is that when you compare them with each other, you find relations that don’t depend on the subject. Best would be the most popular 3 word phrase and 2 word phrase use the 3 most popular single words. In the example above you see that each group uses the same words. So don’t worry too much about keyword density, there is no best density and if you do worry about it, make sure you calculate it in the same way that the person you discuss it with does.
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