SEO Step By Step Guide: 12. SEO Copywriting and Keyword Density

After performing all the necessary analyses, you should start working on your website. It should start with your website’s copywriting. By this time, you will have your list of keywords for each page for which you should optimize your website. You should start developing relevant content for each page. You must find a capable copywriter who is conversant with the SEO principles so that he or she will be able to come up with content that is SEO friendly.

One of the essential factors that has to be taken into consideration while coming up with your website content is keyword density. The keyword density should be neither too high nor too low. There are varied opinions about the right keyword density to be maintained. Moreover, there is also a lot of confusion regarding how the keyword density is calculated. Normally, when we want to calculate the percentage of a particular word in the given text, we will be using the following formula:

Keyword density     = (total number of times your keyword repeats) / (total
word count)

If we use the above formula, we will be coming to some bizarre conclusions regarding keyword density because the range of keyword density that is suggested for good ranking is 5% to 20%. You just need to do the math to see how strange your content would read if you have to go by the 20% suggestion using the above formula. For example, if your total word count per page is 500 then 20% of the total word count would be 100. You cannot possibly have your keyword repeat for 100 times and still make your text read normal. You would certainly be concentrating more than one keyword per page. Even if you have to use a maximum of 4 keywords per page, then to maintain a keyword density of 20% for each keyword will eat up 400 words! In this case, even 5% would be high.

What we have to understand regarding keyword density is that search engines look and web pages much differently than the human viewers. They do not judge the pages by the total number of words per page. This is where we face problems and only when we understand clearly how search engines look at web pages we will be able to make some decent progress with our optimization efforts. While assessing your web page’s content, search engines take an entire different approach, which we will discuss elaborately in the next post. For now to get a feel of how search engines calculate the keyword density, you can use one of the free tools available online. One of the reliable tools that you can consider would be Googlerankings.com/kdindex.php.

You will also find varied opinion regarding the importance of keyword density. There are number of webmasters who advocate that keyword density is no more important. You should not be surprised with such diametrically opposing points of views. In the next post, we will discuss how search engines calculate keyword density.

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