How Keyword Density Will Affect Your Search Engine Ranking

How Keyword Density Will Affect Your Search Engine Ranking


One of the main forms of generating traffic is through the use of articles. Whether these are used only our website, on web 2.0 properties or submitted to directories, they are a vital part of Internet marketing.

In order to get maximum effect from your articles you need to understand a concept called Keyword Density.

This is a measure of how many times a keyword appears in the article.

The real trick to writing successful articles is to get the keyword density right. Have too few keywords in your article and the search engines won't be able to understand what your article is about. Have too many keywords in your article and the search engines will penalize you for spamming.

Before we look at what keyword density is best you need to understand how to calculate it.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage. To calculate it you take the number of times the keyword appears in the article, divide it by the total number of words and multiple it by one hundred.

If your article is 100 words long and your keyword appears 5 times then the calculation is:

Number of times the keyword appears (5) divided by the total number of words (100) which equals 0.05. This is then multipled by 100 to give the percentage, i.e. 5%.

You should aim for a keyword density of between 2% and 5% ion your articles. So long as your density is within this range you will be fine. Don't aim for 5% all the time or 2%, just write naturally and don't overuse your keyword.

Microsoft Word (and other word processors) have a function to count the number of words in the article. If you then perform a find and replace for your keyword, replacing it with the same word it will give you the total number of words replaced, i.e. the number of keywords.

Then it's just some simple maths and there you have your keyword density.

You need to pay attention to the keyword density on all of your web content. It's a very important figure that will help you to maximize the effectiveness of your articles.