An Overall View On Keyword Density And Its Importance In SEO

Being a foundational concept of SEO, keyword density always plays a vital part in the ranking. It can have a solid impact on the costs of your digital marketing campaign along with the visibility of the contents of your site in SERPs, i.e., search engine result pages, it is necessary to know about the working process of it.

However, at the same time, the importance of keyword density in the leading search engine ranking algorithms is changing its nature year after year. That is why it is really important to understand the concept of keyword density and how it can affect the rank of a page.

Keyword Density: The Definition

Keyword density is all about the number of times one uses a keyword in content or on a single webpage on the basis of the overall word count. Many times we have seen that it is also referred to as keyword frequency. And it is also considered as the frequency with the help of that a specific keyword appears on a particular webpage.

The Formula of Keyword Density

You can calculate the number of times you used a keyword as a specific figure. Therefore, you just need to divide the number of times a given keyword is placed by the total number of words on the page. And what you will get as a result is the keyword density of the page.

Keyword Density = Number of Times the Keyword is used ÷ Total Word count

TF-IDF

TF-IDF is one of the advanced ways of measuring keyword density and it stands for terms frequency and inverse document frequency.  For retrieving information or text mining, this statistic helps to determine the importance of a given term to a document. Along with some other important SEO factors, TF-IDF can also quantify the relevance of a page’s content to a user’s search query.

Keyword Stuffing

The technique ‘keyword stuffing’ was very popular around 10 years ago when SEO used to be an emerging discipline. Generally, when a keyword is crammed forcefully or unnaturally as many times as possible in a single webpage, it is called keyword stuffing.

Over the years, we have seen this kind of SEO practices mainly in some lengthy footers at the bottom of webpages. And at the same time, you can find slight keyword variants of common search terms. You will find them especially in these footers of the webpages. With the help of this kind of technique, some of the corrupt search engine optimization professionals manage to rank on the first page of leading search engines without putting that effort.

But this kind of keyword stuffing practice has changed its nature over the year. Nowadays, Google’s algorithms are now capable of interpreting these keyword-stuffed pages. And this kind of cheap hack to engineer the search engine result pages does not work anymore. Along with that, Google penalizes sites who misuse SEO practices by keyword stuffing in narrow content.

The Correct Number of Keywords

As we said before there is no hard-and-fast rule regarding keyword density. It depends on the nature of the content of the copy and as per the requirement of the content. For example, when it comes to an older evergreen blog post, you need a little more keywords to rank higher than a timely, syndicated news article.

However, many of the SEOs prefer the use of one keyword per 200 words of the content. That means if your webpage contains only a single paragraph of 200 words you should go for only one keyword. Further, you can also use keyword safely more than this and Google won’t penalize you. But it is good according to the SEO community to use roughly one keyword per 200 words.

Keyword Variants

When keyword targeting is still mattered a lot in SEO techniques these days, there is another SEO practice to rank higher in the leading search engines. It is the use of keyword variants. Nowadays, we can see the use of a keyword in a little different manner.

The keyword variants concept is also full of shades. It can crop up by various mistakes due to some improper dealing of it. That is why the newcomers to SEO have to be more careful in this case as these keyword variants can be proved as highly problematic to them.

At the time of including keyword variants in your content, you should be more careful as they can be harmful if you use them in an improper way. That means you can use keyword variants to maximize visibility. In this way, you will get more audience but it is better to keep the density 0.5%.

Keyword Clustering

The relevance of Google’s algorithm is crucial in every way. It seems that Google’s algorithm anticipates groups of semantically related keywords within web content. And that happens because it helps Google to get contextual clues to know the content in detail. At the same time, it happens instead of the importance of avoiding keywords stuffing in your webpages. And we call this ‘keyword clustering’.

Researchers say that Google likes certain contextualize keywords in relation to the content. That is why clustering relevant keywords together help a lot in getting a higher rank.

Final Remarks

Along with the density, it’s important to use hard data instead of doing assumptions while targeting keywords. You should A/B test your site that will help to not affect the visibility of your site in search results. And you hope that it will you to improve the ranking of your page in search engine result pages.

Hope the article will help you to get a full view of keyword density. It is one of the most important factors that play a vital part in high ranking in SERPs. It is crucial to observe it carefully. You can leave your comment behind to enlighten us with your important view on this article.