Success on the Internet

This is an old article that, upon my rereading it, I realize that it’s about a topic that can elicit strong feelings one way or the other. Keyword density. Some take a lot of time to get it just the way they want it. Others don’t give a care. Who’s right? The jury is still out, and probably will be for a long, long time, but read on anyway:

Keyword density is determined by dividing the number of words of text in your page by the number of times your keyword phrase appears. If your page has 300 words and you use your keywords 3 times, then your keyword density is 1%.

You should strive to include your keywords often enough to the the percentage up a bit, but not at the sake of readability for your human visitors. Ways to increase the keyword density includes using the kdywords in “alt” tags for your images, as mentioned before in your title and meta description and H1 tags, and normal text content.

My opinion is that going more than 3% on keyword density is pushing it, and under 1% will affect your placement negatively. If you can get in the 1-3% range, without making the page sound tacky, you’ve done a good job, and should be rewarded by the search engines, assuming the other factors that we’ve already discussed are followed also.