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SEO keyword density – Does a dense distribution truly benefit?

March 5, 2020

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SEO keyword density must be a part of your query so that we can welcome you to this article. If so, we even believe that whoever you are, a business owner or a marketing specialist, when you clicked into this link, you should have expected something more unique than tons of things people can inform you out there about SEO.

It is getting harder to get top ranking on search engines. Technicians have created many tools to enhance the analysis on any writing. We can list out prominent ones such as Google Hummingbird Update, Google Penguin Update, Google Panda Update,… Therefore, you may start to wonder why you apply all useful theories but never get a high ranking.

Optimal SEO keyword density is an absolute myth although the information resource is limitless. You must have come across things like: SEO keyword density really matters in getting a good SEO score. However, there is a secret lies behind this.

Table of Contents

How is keyword density commonly misunderstood?

a woman thinking about seo keyword density myths

Everyone must all be too familiar with this SEO strategy. SEO keywords are defined as a word or a phrase of words that describe the content of a webpage. In other words, keywords are shortcuts to sum up the entire page. To form the web page’s metadata, keywords play a very important role to help the search engines match the page with an appropriate search query.

From there, a logic naturally comes up and is accepted widely. People assume that the greater SEO keyword density is, the higher chance the page is found by algorithms and may outrank others.

However, these days, through machine learning capabilities, Google and other search engines can easily differ keywords for search engine optimization and “keyword stuffing”. The latter stands for the technique of spamming keywords all over the article to get a higher density. And of course, SERPs (search engines) have their way to penalize. Webpages like this never get the chance to be on the first search result page. Besides, if this phenomenon is continued, the page is likely to stand in the “blacklist” of SERPs.

You may think: “How about effective SEO keyword density, it works, doesn’t it ?”. Well, it depends. SERPs have other factors to count on, for example, the time searchers stay on your website. You have no evidence to show that your writing is useful if the majority leaves very shortly after they land in. Or they may take into account the length of what you provide. Google and other search engines always expect to give searchers the full information they need. In this case, a longer text means more detailed text and earns a plus.

All of these examples indirectly tell you that there are more to focus on SEO keyword density. These valuable secrets will appear once you keep reading this article.

The Optimal keyword density for SEO

Don’t pay too much attention to keyword density

There is no ideal optimal SEO keyword density or one-size-fits-all solution. As aforementioned, it is not a good idea to stuff your texts with keywords. But how much is enough to take full advantage?

First, let’s see how we can count the keywords.

Of course, there is a formula to work on keyword density for SEO. It’s super easy:

Count the number of times the main keyword appears on the page.
Count the total words
Divide the result from (1) with the result from (2)
Multiply the result with 100

For example, if your text contains 1000 words and the keyword appears 10 times, that would be 1%.

For more convenience, these tools can also help:

There is a suggestion that SEO keyword density should stand from 0.5% to 2.5%.

In fact, there is no one-size-fits-all ratio. 1%? 2%? A valuable SEO content writing still can gain high ranking with keywords less than 1% in the article. Rand Fishkin of Moz said: “The TRUTH is simply that modern search engines have never used keyword density”.

However, if your content still remains natural with a great density of keywords, it’s not a bad thing to consider. Only in case, you worry that SERPS do not recognize the relevance of your article to search queries, don’t forget that Google has 100+ potential search engine factors. A fewer number of keywords will not take your chance away. The secret is that a page still ranks high with only 2-3 times the keyword appears. But of course, other factors are undeniably nearly perfect to earn the exception.

Be flexible with multiple keywords

Too focusing on SEO keyword density would make your article unnatural, which ranks worse. Don’t let the main keyword run through your content from start to end. Instead, you should prioritize search intent with the research of sub-keywords relating to the query. They are semantically related keywords – words or phrases that are related to each other conceptually.

Why should you change the keyphrase continuously?

Firstly, to make your content seems more natural. Secondly, Google has also published a toolkit with the capability to learn the meaning behind words. It’s Word2vec, which identifies words that are related to each other in certain concepts through the distributed representation of text. Therefore, this toolkit supports Google to better analyze how much your content is relevant to the search queries and this surely relates to your ranking as well. If you stuff keywords and sub-keywords, you can’t hide from very updated algorithms. But if the coherence is subtle, never wonder whether it is recognized or not.

Where to put keywords is much more important than how much you put them

thumbs up for good seo keyword density idea

People hear too much about SEO keyword density that they easily misunderstand that it’s all about SEO. Gradually, the focus is placed on tools and criteria instead of searchers.

Thinking about how to impress them is also a good start for SEO. In fact, loading your content with a lot of keywords is not as efficient as putting them at the right places to attract searchers. “Right places” here are the title tag, headings, URL (slug), meta description and image alt tags.

How can this be correct? Let’s take yourself as an example. When searching for stuff or whenever you are on the Internet, do you find words or phrases like “myth”, “facts you don’t know” or “must-watch” irresistible? Information is now too available on SERPs that people seem to depend on their feelings. Among about 10 results on the first page, do you think that you, as a searcher or anyone else would go for the most appealing titles?

Placing keywords here directly shows them that you provide right the information that they need. Impressive words to better persuade them to click in. SEO keyword density in these important places also seems to be more reliable to searchers because they know that you are always on the right track.

Conclusion

To sum up, we have already pointed out the myth about SEO keyword density and other more practical approaches. However, after you have read all of the articles, we hope that you can see the real message we want to convey as regard to tips for SEO: just focus on your natural writing and content, you will be paid off!

Reference from professional

Here is one saying that we think you can take as a good reference:

“ Personally, I don’t use a calculator… nor do I don’t count the words in my post, but I am careful about the keywords I choose and I do eyeball my posts to see how long it is roughly. I’ve been a Webmaster enough years now that I don’t need to calculate the number of words in my articles to know roughly how many keywords I would need to make the KD about right.

I have found that if I worry about the number of times that a keyword or key phrase needs to appear throughout one of my posts or articles then my writing doesn’t flow very well. And, if my articles don’t flow well…. I’m going to lose my readers. If the people arriving on one of my sites don’t enjoy reading my work it doesn’t really matter if readers can find me in the SERPs or not….. they won’t be sticking around long enough to finish reading my choppy, non-flowing article. So, I try to worry less about keywords and more about content.

Don’t get me wrong…. I still think about KD. It’s just not my main focus….the content is. I come up with the keyword(s) I want to focus on in my post and then write. If I need to tweak my post with more or fewer keywords once it’s written…. I do so then.”

(Shana Albert – one of world’s top Google SEO person)

Lastly, we hope this article is useful for you and your business.

If you want to explore more useful tips and guides towards e-commerce in general, feel free to visit LandOfCoder’s blog page.

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