Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.
Keyword density tells you how often a search term appears in a text concerning the total number of words it contains. For example: if a keyword appears three times in a 100-word text the keyword density would be 3%. From search engines, a high keyword density is a good indicator of search engine spam. If a keyword appears too often on a website, search engines will downgrade the website and it will then appear lower down in search results.
What Is Keyword Density?
Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage or within a piece of content as a ratio or percentage of the overall word count. This is also sometimes referred to as keyword frequency, or the frequency with which a specific keyword appears on a webpage.
Keyword density formula
Keyword density can also be calculated as a specific figure, should you need to. To determine the keyword density of a webpage, simply divide the number of times a given keyword is mentioned by the total number of words on the page – the resulting figure is the keyword density of that page.
What's the Right Keyword Density for SEO?
As with virtually all aspects of SEO, there are no clearly defined “rules” when it comes to keyword density. You won’t find any guidelines from Google that tell you exactly how many keywords a piece of content should contain, nor are there any specific figures or statistics you can rely upon that govern how densely keywords should or should not appear on your site.
There are, however, some considerations that can help you ensure your content is optimized that can increase the visibility of your content and improve the overall experience of your audience.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
About 10 years ago, when SEO was still an emerging discipline, a technique known as “keyword stuffing” became very popular. Keyword stuffing is the practice of cramming as many keywords as possible on a webpage, often in a way that feels forced and unnatural to the reader.
Typically, this was accomplished by including lengthy footers at the bottom of webpages, which would contain dozens – or even hundreds – of slight keyword variants of common search terms. This technique could often be seen on hotel websites, which would often feature footers that consisted of hyperlinked keywords: “cheap hotels Barcelona”, “cheap hotels Cairo”, “cheap hotels Dresden”, for example, each of which would take visitors to another webpage featuring a similarly crowded, keyword-stuffed footer.
How To Calculate Keyword Density?
It is natural to think it is important to identify that sweet spot to achieve higher rankings in Google. The question is what is the optimal keyword density? Is it 1%, 2% 3% or 0.3% or 33% ? If you look online you’ll find a lot of conflicting opinion on the ideal keyword density %. It all sounds very scientific, too.
There is, of course, a FORMULA to work out the local keyword density of any page:
Density = ( Nkr / ( Tkn -( Nkr x ( Nwp-1 ) ) ) ) x 100
Density = your keyword density
Nkr = how many times you repeated a specific key-phrase
Nwp = number of words in your key-phrase
Tkn = total words in the analysed text
The keyword density score for a key-phrase is calculated by looking at:
how many times a specific key-phrase is repeated in a document
the number of words in that key-phrase and
the total number of words in the analyzed text.
There is no best keyword density percent score to rank higher in Google listings. Write naturally, include keywords, and avoid keyword stuffing!
Usage Notes on How to Calculate Keyword Density
Default settings: By default this tool...
includes the meta tags
does not show words that are part of the default stop list or terms with 2 or fewer characters in them.
You can click the checkbox to turn any of these features on and off.
Stemming:
if a word appears as part of a longer word, the stem may show up under the word count of the core word
this is particularly common for things like the plural version of the word also being counted under the singular version of that word
to help visually highlight where terms appear on the page, you can use our SEO toolbar's highlighting function
