What is the keyword density?

Keyword Density is maybe one of the most important on-page factors for Search Engine Optimization. The importance of this factor is that search engines measure the relevancy of a web page towards a certain keyword or keyphrase by counting the amount of occurances and the percent of the cumulated keyword content from the entire content of the page.

What keyword density should I have for my page?

That depends on many aspects including the search engine you're optimizing your page for. Having a low keyword density is a bad thing for all search engines. On the other hand, having a high keyword density can be seen as spam by some search engines. The ideal keyword density could be from 3% up to 5%. Depending on the content size of your page, you should have 10 up to 20 occurances of your keyword in the content of the page.

Where should I put my keyword?

Each page of your website should be optimized for 1-3 keywords top. The best way around is to optimize each page for a single keyword/keyphrase. Now, once you've established your keyword priorities, you need to add the keyword into the following areas of your page:

• Page Title
• Page Description
• Page Keywords
• Headings (h1-h6)
• Links anchors
• Bold/Strong texts

Page Title - The page title should contain at least one keyword/keyphrase occurance. The keyword should be as close to the beginning as possible. You should have at least a 50-60% keyword density.
Page Description - The description should contain if possible a natural-language description of the page. Having a 20-30% keyword density should be well seen by the search engines.
Page Keywords - Add multiple keyphrases containg your keywords as long as each keyphrase has at least one occurance in your page. Some search engines are not using meta-keywords at all.
Headings - Headings are just like internal titles, so the same rule for title applies for headings. Use the headings in a natural way, to create a page hierarchy, and the search engines will be happy.
Links Anchor - This is a very important factor and should be used wiselly. If possible make sure the keyword density for the anchors that contain the keyword is 100%. You can add links with your keyword as anchor by adding navigation path to your pages or internal search links.
Bold/Strong texts - For content keywords, you can add some bold/strong formating to them, which will increase the strength of the keyword. You can also use the underline and italic formatings which will also help a little bit.

In the page content, your keyword density should be uniform accross several sections of the page. This will indicate search engines that the keywords appear in a page that uses a natural language and the page is not generated automatically. So split your content in 3 and make sure you have the same keyword density in all 3 sections.

You should also make sure your keyword/keyphrase appeat in the url of your page and also in some link anchors of inbound links. This will sugest search engines that the pages is realy about what your keyword means. So use your keyword also when submiting your site to a directory or when you do link exchange.

How could I increase the keyword density of a page?

Sometimes having the right keyword density is not that easy. Here are a couple of things you can do:

• Add related external content (articles, news, rss feds)
• Add related internal content: search results based on keywords or tags
• Review your content and try to rephrase the text to contain the keyword. This is the best way to increase the keyword density

How should I use this tool?

The keyword density tool should be use to monitor your keyword density whenever you're doing signifiant changes to a page. You should monitor your most important pages specially when your content is dynamic.