by Dovinea

Created on: April 17, 2008

Keyword density is an important term to understand if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings. And while it may sound complicated, it is actually a very simple concept.

Keyword density is nothing more than the number of times a keyword is used on a web page. It plays a major role in search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines use keywords as part of the scoring system of ranking pages to be displayed in the search engine results. Using too few words can keep your website from being indexed, while too many words can cause penalization from search engines and keep your pages out of the rankings as well.

To determine your keyword density, you will need to start by getting a total word count for each of your pages. This can be done by copying the text of each page into a word processing program and using the word count tool. Once you have determined the total number of words on a particular page, you will then need to count the number of times your keywords appear on that page.

Now that you have a the total number of words, and the number of times your keyword or phrase is used, simply divide the number of keywords or phrases by the total number of words used to give you a percentage of keyword density.

For example, if you have a total of 500 words on your page, and your keyword appears 10 times, you would take 10 divided by 500, which equals .02 or 2%.

While 2% is a fair percentage, I prefer to aim for 3% - 5%. Staying between these percentages will keep you in a safe range for indexing. To determine the number of keywords needed to reach the target of 3-5%, simply take the total number of words and multiply it by .03, .04 or .05 to determine the number need to reach 3%, 4%, or 5%.

So, using the example of 500 words again, to determine the number of keywords needed to reach 3%, you would use: 500 x.03= 15, or 15 keywords. For a 4% density, 500 x .04= 20 keywords, etc.

There are also many tools available online that will do the calculations for you. They can be found by doing a search on "Keyword Density Tool" or "Keyword Density Calculator." These types of tools are very helpful if you are calculating the keyword density of multiple pages.

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