Keyword Density: How Important for SEO?

Keyword density, or the number of times your keyword appears per 100 words.

Keywords are important for ranking in search results. How important is keyword density for SEO?

Keyword density has been an important part of SEO. In the early days, it was critical for search rankings. Search engine bots used keyword density as a signal for page relevancy. Many people started stuffing keywords in their webpages to rank higher. Eventually, the keyword stuffing tactic stopped working as search engines fixed their flaws. However, it continued to play an important role. Keyword density of 1-3% was considered ideal for SEO. It stands true even today.

Today, when search engines have evolved to read text along with their context, keyword density isn’t an important ranking factor. Artificial intelligence and machine learning now analyse webpages for ranking. Nonetheless, it makes sense to pay focus on keywords.

What is keyword?

A keyword is a search term or phrase that people type in search engines. It is the search query. As a business website or blog, you take the monthly search volumes of keywords and focus on the best ones that match your business goals.

How to calculate keyword density?

Keyword density is the percentage of how often your keyword appears in the content. It is the number of times your keyword appears per 100 words.

Let’s take an example.

Number of times of Keyword A appears in text: 10

Total word count of the content / article: 1000

Keyword density of Keyword A in the article = (10/1000)*100 % = 1%

In this illustration, our keyword density is 1%.

What is the best keyword density?

With machine learning and artificial intelligence, there’s no need to stuff keywords. Search engines can easily learn what the article is all about without considering the keyword density.

However, this doesn’t mean that keyword density is totally irrelevant today.

Even today, the ideal keyword density is 1-3%.

However, the keyword density today should now include the number of times synonyms and variants of the keyword appear in the content.

All your articles should have the primary keyword in the H1 heading title tag. It should also be present in the page title and description meta tags. Of course, your target keyword should appear prominently at least once on the page.

Don’t focus on stuffing keywords.

Today, you need to focus on creating great content and deliver what your visitors are looking for. Try to create content based on user intent. If your users are expecting a detailed review, give them a great product review. If they want to learn the product specifications, let them have it.

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