Keyword Density Tips

Evaluating keyword density is a large part of any SEO campaign. You need to research, evaluate and decide what keyword phrases will yield best results, and then write your pages. Once you select keyword phrases for your website you need to start using them as much as you can without being too obvious. You should use your keyword phrase in several places in your page, including:

• the meta title
• meta keywords
• meta description
• h1, h2, and h3 headlines (and h4-h6, if you have them)
• the first paragraph of text in the HTML
• in link text
• in alternate text for images
• scattered throughout the rest of the text on the page

If there isn’t enough text on the page, repeating your keyword phrase in this amount can result a page that is keyword stuffed; which means that you keyword density is way too high for readers to be able to enjoy reading your content.

Readability is the key, not keyword density! Readability not just by search engines, but by your visitors. If humans find the text annoying to read they will leave your site pronto, no matter how much or little your keyword phrase appears. You can test drive your article on friends to see if they can pick out the target phrases – they shouldn‘t be able to do so instantly, but after some study it should be apparent. If it isn’t overt, but it does get the message across about what the article is aimed at, then the repetitions of your keyword phrases is probably about right and you haven’t included it too often.

Keyword density in any case should top out at about 5%. This means that out of the entire webpage content, your main keyword phrase should be no more than 5% of the total words. More than that starts looking like a keyword spammer to search engines, and can be annoying to your customers – making your pages difficult to read.

A keyword density of 3-4% usually works to get the keyword phrase across without being obvious to the customer. This still lets the search engines know what your page is about, and combines good SEO with user friendliness.

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