Understanding Keyword Density and Frequency

There is an art to placing keywords on your web site. You cannot simply type health, health, health, health, health again and again. That would be considered spam and would get your site pulled from the search engines index. On the other hand, a user who sees "health, health, health, health..." would hit Back on the browser window. Remember, you want to keep people so that they will stick around and be converted from a visitor to a customer. To do that, you have to create searchable, readable content for your web site.

In this post, we talk about how to distribute on your pages the keywords you gather, and how to determine the number of times you need to use them.

Keyword density is the measurement of the number of times a keyword appears on a web page, compared to the total number of words on the page. To determine density, you take the number of words on the page (say, 800) and the number of times that the word appears on that page (maybe 20 times). Divide 20 by 800 to get a density of about 2.5%. Keyword density is one of the factors a search engine looks at when determining whether a web page is relevant to that search.

Frequency is another factor; it is simply how many times a word appears on the page; in this case, 20 times. The combination of frequency and density is the prominence. Higher density and higher frequency lead to greater prominence of the term.

Search engine spiders generally put more weight on the first 200 words on a web page, including words in your navigation, headings, and so on. It is important to make sure that your keywords appear early on the page so the search engines and your visitor know what you are all about from the get go.

The spiders are looking at these three things for keywords:

Frequency: How often a keyword is used on a web page. Any word (or phrase) is considered a keyword if it is used at least twice in the page. The search engines do not include stop words such as and, the, a, etc. as keywords although they may be part of keywords.

Density: Keyword density is like frequency, but it measures what percentage of the total page content the keyword appears. You want a keyword density of 3-5% for a web page for a good search engine optimization.

Distribution: This measures whether the keyword is evenly distributed throughout the page and the site. In general, it is better to sprinkle the keywords evenly through the page in a normal writing fashion. Natural-sounding text is easier to read, and scores better with search engines.

Look for proper keyword distribution when writing your text. Search engine users are getting more sophisticated these days and enter search queries that contain three to four words instead of just two or three.

If you are a good writer, you are going to have to tame some of those habits you learned while writing papers. Good writers are encouraged to use synonyms and rephrase things to keep from being too repetitive. This makes a document easier to read, surely, but it won’t help with your site rankings. For instance, if you want to rank high for a query like “weight loss”, you’re going to have to keep using the words weight loss in your page instead of using this and it and so forth. Use discretion when doing this; otherwise, your page could become unpleasant to read. Your competition is a good way to get an idea of what looks natural to search engines.

Remember that search engines count every instance of a word on a web page. This includes all words in the main content plus that in headings, navigation elements, links, and HTML tags. Here is an example of how you might evenly distribute a main keyword throughout a page that had 750 words divided into five paragraphs:

• Once in the Title tag
• Once or twice in the description Meta tag (in the HTML code)
• Once or twice in the keywords Meta tag (in the HTML code)
• Once in the first sentence of on-page (user visible) text
• Twice in the first 200 words (including the first sentence)
• Once each in paragraphs two, three, and four
• Once or twice in the last paragraph

Remember that there is such a thing as using too many keywords — that is how you venture into the realm of spam through keyword stuffing. There is no guaranteed magic number for keyword frequency or density, but it is a good rule of thumb to keep your keyword below five percent of the total number of words on the page. The better way to do it is to make it sound natural as compared to your competition. Use a keyword too often, and you could trip an alarm on a keyword stuffing filter. Keywords repeated too often also work against user retention and could bring down the conversion rate.

For a commercial Web site, you want to keep customers around so they will make purchases, and you risk driving them away with too much repetition. For an informational or reference Web site, the goal is to have as many visitors as possible stick around and read the information available. Badly written text does not make someone want to stay on your Web site.

Do the search engines measure keyword densities differently? As with all areas of SEO, there is some argument over this issue. Generally, however, there is agreement that Google is less tolerant of heavy keyword usage than Yahoo! or Microsoft. And because all search engines continuously try to refine and improve their spam filters, you don’t want to get too close to the line of what might be unacceptable.

Want to make sure a search engine does not miss your keywords? You can draw more attention to keywords by applying special formatting, such as strong strong or emphasis em, changing the font size, or using Heading tags. Putting them in the page titles (in the HTML Title tags) and the description and keywords Meta tags (also in the HTML code) is also recommended,

Adjusting Keywords

After you optimize your Web site for your selected keywords, be aware that your job is not done. Search engine optimization involves continual monitoring, testing, and tracking. You need to keep track of how your keywords are performing as you go along.

If a keyword is not drawing in as much traffic as you think it should be, or it’s drawing in the wrong kind of traffic (visitors who don’t convert), it’s time to go in and change it. This is why you do a bunch of research into your competition, and to look up synonyms while you are at it.