Keyword Density in SEO

Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. It helps your content get top rank. A few years ago, some marketers used keyword stuffing to increase their website rankings.

But today everything has changed and it does not work as before. Now search engines have become much smarter and more efficient.

Today in this article I will tell you what is the ideal keyword density percentage in SEO.

Let’s get started…

What is Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of the number of how often a targeted keyword appears in a total number of words.

For example, if a blog post has 700 words and uses keyword 7 times, it means the keyword density in the article is 1%.

How to Calculate Keyword Density

(Number of keywords/ Total number of words) * 100

If you want to find out the keyword density for your content, you will need to:

• Your keyword
• Count the total number of words on the page
• Divide the Number of keywords appears with the page’s total word count and then multiply the results with 100.

You can use these free keyword density checker tools:

• Smallseotools.com
• Tools.seobook.com
• Prepostseo.com
• Thehoth.com

Apart from this, if you are a WordPress user and use Yoast SEO on your site, then you can easily see the keyword density for your content. Just add your focus keyword, it will show you keyword density with lots of optimization steps.

What’s Ideal Keyword Density Percentage

Let’s make it clear – in recent times, keyword frequency matters little to site quality and site authority. Google suggests writing articles keeping in mind the user experience. Use your keywords smartly and place your keyword in natural places. This will give you better results.

If you use your keywords many times, will you rank higher in SERPs?

But doing so can be really bad because Google may see your page as “keyword stuffing” and may lead to an over-optimization penalty.

I recommend keeping 1-2% keyword density with semantic keywords. Semantic keywords are terms that are synonyms, variations, or contextually related to the target keyword. 

What Is Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is when someone repeating the same target keyword over and over to manipulate their position in the search results.

At one time, this was a very popular strategy to achieve the top rank in SERPs. However, it is not used today and it belongs to black hat SEO.

You should avoid this because keyword stuffing is against Google’s quality guidelines, and this can lead to search engine penalties that can remove pages from SERPs.

Here are quick tips to place keyword into the right places:

• Title tag (at the beginning of the title)
• In the permalink
• H1 tag
• H2 tag
• Start of the article
• End of the article
• Meta description
• Image alt tags

Again: if you repeatedly use keywords on your content, it makes your content unnatural and spammy. Also, high keyword density can also create a poor experience for readers.

Now that you have a better understanding of keyword density, further here I have shared some tips and tricks for keyword research for you.

Here is a guide on how to choose keywords for SEO.

• Use High Search Volume Keywords – This is very important. The more people search for a keyword, the more traffic you get.
• Long Tail Keywords – If your site is brand new or you want to target keywords with less competition, then Long Tail Keywords can be effective.
• Competition – Always select low competition keywords for your content. This increases the likelihood of your content ranking higher in results.
• Related Keywords – Use Related Keywords to optimize your content better. It helps Google better understand what your content is about.

Final Thought

There is no clear, ideal keyword density described by search engines. Most SEO experts believe that an ideal keyword density is around 1-2%.

Quick tips for keyword density for your content:

• Write for readers first – Create high-quality, compelling, and valuable content for your readers. Once you write the article, you can naturally add keywords and reach the keyword density by 1-2%.
• Use semantic keywords support target keyword – Search engines use semantic keywords to understand what page is about and rank webpages.

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