As a blogger, you might have heard the term. But what’s the good keyword density?
For getting the most out of Google, higher Keyword density helps. Right?
What if I say it is wrong? Bam.
So what is keyword density?
Alright, keyword density refers to the ratio of the number of total words to that of the total words containing the keyword.
Let’s say you have your 3-word keyword appeared twice in your 200-word article. Then your keyword density would be,
(((3*2)/200)*100)% that is in this case it is 3%.
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What is the Ideal Keyword Density for SEO?[/caption]Does higher keyword density, boosts your ranking for your target keyword? The answer is yes. But to some extent. Nevertheless, if you keep your keyword density above normal, you will certainly become the victim of keyword stuffing.
Keywords only tell Google what your content is about.
What is the ideal keyword density?
There’s no magic number. The keyword density depends upon the nature of the keyword and content.
In some sort of posts, more keyword density would make the blog post unreadable.
For example,
If you are targeting long tail keywords, then you need less keyword density. On the other hand, if you’re targeting highly competitive short tail keywords, then you need more keyword density.
Stuffing long tail keywords in your blog content renders your content unreadable. However, short tail, one-word keywords can hold a bit of it.
As I said earlier that there is no magic number, the ideal keyword density is that which keeps your content natural and human readable.
If you are baffled about what keyword density to keep up, search for the high-ranking similar blog posts that you are blogging about.
Examine what keyword density they have maintained. Optimize the keyword placement better than them. Keep the same keyword density.
FACT: Blog posts with high word count tend to rank higher because they cover more keywords. A blog post with 1000 words and 2% keyword density rank easily higher than that of blog post with 500 words with the same 2% keyword density.
Where to include the main keyword
Entirely ignoring main keyword may somewhat be not advised.
Once you find the effective keyword targeting in your blog post, preferably long tail keywords. The next job for you is to optimize your blog content for that keyword.
Positioning of main keywords matters a lot.
For example, take 2 pieces of content having the same keyword density of 2%. If in the first piece of content, keyword appears in the first paragraph and in the second piece of content, the keyword does not appear in the first paragraph, then the first blog content may rank well.
If the second blog content is in the site with high authority, then the game changes.
So where to include those main keywords?
Here are the places where you can include the exact main keyword in your blog post.
- Blog URL
- Blog post title
- The first paragraph of the blog post
- The ending paragraph of the blog post
- Include KW in one or 2 ALT tags of your images
- Anchor text of your backlinks
- Anchor text of your internal links
Don’t stress too much on usage of keywords in your blog posts. Keywords automatically included in your blog post once you speak your mind.
In Layman terms, ” A blogger who is not at all concentrating on keyword optimization can rank outstandingly in Google.”
How to boost keyword density without repeating keywords?
As you may know that, Google also looks at the related keywords to the mainstream keywords in your blog content. Including keywords related to the content of your blog, greatly boosts SEO of your blog.
Keywords related to the main keywords for your blog called as LSI keywords.
They help Google in accurately finding out the nature of the content on your blog. It also helps Google to develop its LSI index.
LSI keywords are also called as semantic keywords. I have already discussed in detail how to do semantic keyword research.
For example, let me take the example. The terms “LSI” and “semantic” are closely related. They form a single entity (keywords with same meaning). As they are nothing but the main keyword in the eyes of Google, they boost keyword density.
Uniformly spread these LSI keywords all over your article. The usage of these keywords makes your blog content seem natural and SEO friendly.
Why is keyword density losing its importance?
Keyword density is not as important as it once did.
With the arrival of LSI algo and stress on off page SEO, keyword density is definitely losing its importance.
Google looks at the anchor texts of backlinks and internal links, to rank the content for the keyword.
Rather than including the main keyword repeated in the blog content, including the keyword in the anchor text of backlinks and internal links would make more sense.
Remember that including the same anchor text in tons of your back links may penalize you. It will be an intelligent step to include LSI keywords as anchor text of your backlinks, by keeping the future of SEO in mind.
There is hardly any correlation between the rankings and the keyword density in the blog content.
Here’s Matt Cutts views on ideal keyword density for SEO.
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