What is keyword density and what is its ideal value?
If you are looking to have a website with a favorable Google ranking, pay attention to the density of your keywords. Now the question is, what is keyword density? What is the ideal density of keywords? In this article, you are going to get a detailed answer to these questions. Stay with us.
What is keyword density?
Keyword Density is the percentage of use of a keyword (we have already talked about what a keyword is ) or keyword phrase in relation to the total number of words in the content of a page.
There is no best keyword density! You should write naturally and avoid repeating keywords too many times.
John Mueller, a senior member of the Google team, answers this question as follows:
In general, Keyword Density is something I don’t pay attention to. Search engines have passed this stage!
The remarkable thing is that no one has ever mentioned the positive effect of overuse of keywords on the ranking of results in search engines. But on the contrary, there are websites that suffer from overuse Of the keywords, they have been punished by Google.
We know that Google has 200 ranking factors, but the claim is that keyword density is of particular importance.
How to calculate keyword density ?
You can use the following formula to calculate the keyword density on the page:
Density = ( Nkr / ( Tkn -( Nkr x ( Nwp-1 ) ) ) x 100
- Density : The density of your keyword
- Nkr : Number of keyword repetitions in the text
- Nwp : The number of words in your main phrase
- Tkn : Total number of words on the page
Why is keyword density important?
Knowing how many times you have used a keyword or phrase on a page can be very important. The reason is to prevent keyword stuffing on the page.
Note: If you overuse the main keywords, you may be penalized by Google!
What is keyword stuffing ?
In the past, this method was considered one of the practical techniques for ranking sites on the first page of search engines. In this way, a large number of keywords were placed on the page and search engines considered a special rank for that page due to the connection of that page with the keyword searched by users.
But with search engines becoming smarter, this method is completely obsolete, and Google introduced the hummingbird algorithm to seriously deal with the offending websites. From Google’s point of view, this is a spamming method of providing low-quality content and clearly recommends that you avoid doing it.
Note: The results of this work may be positive in the short term, but this is not a tactic that can help you in the long term, and Google will penalize your website through signals from users.
What should be the density of keywords on the page?
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the number of repetitions of keywords should be completely natural and consistent with the content of the page, and it is not possible to follow a standard number or a single rule for all pages.
But experience shows that the best on-page keyword density is between 1 and 3 percent . Also, to improve the user experience, keyword derivatives can be used in titles and other parts of the page. For example, if your main keyword is website design, you can use terms such as cheap website design, website design training, website design in Tehran, etc., which are called lsi words .
Note : Repeated use of specific and identical keywords will create a bad user experience for page visitors in addition to punishing the site by Google.
In what parts of the page is it important to insert keywords?
In general, the prominence of the main keyword in the following sections can be effective:
- Keyword placement in the title
- Include the main keyword in the opening paragraph
- The main text in the image alt
- Keyword in page URL
- Meta description or Meta Description
In SEO, there is no special magic for the placement of keywords, but usually Google tends to rank certain pages based on the quality and credibility of the content and the reputation of the website.
Google is more interested in user satisfaction signals. That is, if users are interested in your pages, Google will also like them, and this issue will go beyond the density of keywords on the page.
Conclusion
Keyword density may not be as important as it used to be, but it is still one of the most important factors in SEO. If you are having trouble using the above formula to calculate the percentage of keyword density, we suggest using plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math for this task. These plugins automatically Keyword Density of the page. calculate and display the
