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Keyword Density
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| There is probably as much disagreement and misunderstanding in SEO of what an acceptable level of Keyword Density (KwD) than most other aspects of optimization. Some of the varying opinions are: |
| 1. When optimizing for Google you should not go above a 2% ratio of KwD in any page element such as page titles, content, Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. |
| 2. For other search engines, you can go up to a density of 5% of the above and be safe.
We totally disagree with this for several reasons. However, all things being equal, a site that knows to push their densities to the line will rank higher in the SERP’s. |
| Now, let us take a look at the top spot holders for some competitive keywords. Let’s take the key word “Free.” Google returns 1.94 billion results from this term(As of this writing).
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| Google Result for the keyword
Free
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| Now lets take a closer look at http://www.thefreesite.com |
| First, the page title; “TheFreeSite.com is the best place to find freebies, freeware, free stuff, samples, downloads, email, games, free software, fonts, Webmaster freebies, MP3s, sweepstakes, contests, coupons, catalogs, free food.” Note there are multiple instances of the word “free.” However, the KwD in this case is 7 words out of 29 total – 7/29= 24 %. So this is way beyond common recommendations for page title KwD. |
| An analysis report on the web page is below. |
| 1. The word free was found 41 times out of 451 words on the homepage. This correlates to a KwD of 9.09% |
| 2. In Link Text – 24 out of 143 words = 16.78% |
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3. Bold Text – 18 out of 127 words = 14.17% |
| Given the above, the best practices for KwD are: |
- In the title tag, KwD should be between 7% - 16%. This must be supported by adequate
content densities.
- Homepage content area KwD should be between 7% - 13%. The important thing to remember
here is that you can exceed this as long as the related keywords and phrases are relevant
to the page and site you are ranking fort.
- The sites content pages should maintain a KwD for the key words as phrases they are
optimized for of 7% - 9%.
- Whenever possible your images should have alt tags that reflect the keywords for that page.
- In the Meta description tag, The KwD should you should use the additional space to
increasing the densities of related, secondary terms. For these secondary terms,
you want to get your KwD up to 2% - 3% of the description tag.
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