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Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

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If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

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Keywords Keyword, Keyword Density

Keyword density and positioning are important areas of search engine optimization. The search engine spiders will scan a page with certain algorithms to determine what the topic of the article, report, or white paper is referring to.

This is basically done by totaling up all the nouns and pronouns, picking the most used and classifying the relevancy of the article. This is how they determine the “keyword” that your article is written about. The search engines then place this keyword relevant article in the results pages of that particular Search Engine.

Why Keywords?

Your keyword should be placed a few times in random areas of the body text of your articles. This usually occurs without effor twhen you write about a specific subject.

You will want to mention the subject at least one time perparagraph thus defining the relative keyword for the article, report or white paper. Without mentioning the keyword enough times, the search engines will not be able to determine what the article is written about.

Over Doing The Keyword Thing

It is very important not to over do the keyword to the point that the written article sounds stupid. The term “keyword stuffing” is when someone purposely overloads their article with the same keyword, trying to get a higher search engine rank because of relevancy.

It’s pretty obvious when stuffing is going on, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice it and the search engines spot it right off. When the SE’s determine that you have stuffed your article, they will de-list the article and possibly blacklist the rest of your site as well.

If it looks like the keyword is in your article to many times, try to come up with synonyms for it to make the page flow better without repeating the word.

Keyword Density, How Does It Work?

Keyword density is the times your word is presented in your article, report or white papers. Most people try to use a % to figure out just how often they put a keyword in each article.

An example would be if you had a 400 word article or report and want to obtain a keyword density of 4%, you would want to have the word on your page exactly 16 times. Or basically 4 times in each of the 4 paragraphs. There are many ways, including software that will show you the keyword density of an article and there is no perfect number.

It depends on what works for you and what gets you the better rankings for your articles. Every webmaster has their own density they prefer to achieve due to past results.

What Is The Best Density?

Typically we try to achieve around 3%, sometimes more, sometimesless, just depends on the article or report. Sometimes it’s hard to get 3-4% when writing white papers and specialized magazine articles. Don’t worry about it, the SE’s programs are smart enough to tell what an article is written about with the use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). LSI in a nutshell is related keywords.

The keyword “article” has LSI of: Paper, essay, report, magazin earticle, white papers and the plural of the words also. (see I was able to “stuff” a little just by mentioning this!). It is important to structure your keywords in your articles to have an hourglass shape to it. In other words, more in the first and last paragraphs than in the middle.

Typically when someone is describing a subject, they will speak about the item right off, then go into specifics, then give a conclusion about the subject. Thus giving the hourglass effect of your keywords in the article.

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Keywords Keyword, Keyword Density, Search Engine Optimization, SEO