Are you keyword dense?

One criteria you must keep in the back of your mind when you are optimizing your web-page is Keyword Density.

Per wikipedia;
Keyword density is the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

That means the number of times the keyword phrase appears (or reappears) on your web-page is one of the statitistics used to determine relevance/ranking.

Why is Keyword Density important?

To understand the importance of Keyword Density, lets look at how Search Engines calculate the relevance of a certain keyword phrase on a page. When a Search Engine spider arrives at a page, it does not see all the fancy artwork you have on the page. All it can see is the html and other code on the page including the body text, header text, the menu text and the footer text (if any).

It MAY also consider the keyword phrases appearing in the names of the images on the page as well as the folder names. "may" is the operative word here since no search engine divulges the algorithm it uses to calculate relevancy.

If the exact steps of calculation became available, it makes it so much easier for unscrupulous web-masters to hack the engine. Most of the information we have are derived from experimentation and discussion among those in the field.

In the initial days, the more the repetition, the better the effect. But the bad apples soon started what became known as "keyword stuffing". They would stuff the page with lots of keywords; much more than it would make sense for a human visitor to the page. To hide this practice, they used various Black Hat techniques like hiding words in comment tags, using the same font color as the background etc.

Beware, if you have been tempted to use these techniques, the Search Engines are quite savvy and are aware of all these and many other techniques. These practices will not only not server you any good, they will get you penalized.

How much should your keyword density be?

Conventional wisdom varies from 3 to 7 to 9 percent depending on who you are talking to. Here is a simple calculation you might use:

eg. If you have 200 words on a page, and your keywords appear about 15 times, then

Keyword Density = (15/200) * 100 Keyword Density = 7.5%

There are two schools of thought prevalent as far as keyword density is concerned. Each have their own merits, but I will tell you which one I like to follow and why.

1)Entire Text is used in calculation:

One idea is that Search Engines consider the entire text available on the page, including words appearing in comments, meta header tags and other various seen and unseen elements on page.

Even though some Search Engines like Yahoo and Ask! still consider the keyword phrases appearing in the "meta keywords" tag, I am not sure if they really use the text elsewhere to consider keyword density.

All search engines crawl and index and maybe even cache the entire page in their databases. This does not prove that they consider the whole text while considering keyword relevance.

2) Only visible Text is used:

The second idea is that spiders consider only that text that is available for a human visitor to see. These days, spiders are pretty smart programs. They are managed(and continuously updated) by some of the smartest people on the planet and they are always trying to stay one step ahead of the spammers. They already are aware of all the tricks out there and if they see something new, you can bet all your marbles they are all over it in a jiffy.

So, I like to consider only that portion of the web-page that is visible to the human user. This includes all visible text inside the body tag. To this I add the folder and image names that are on the page. Also remember to consider the menu Anchor and title texts. I should like to think that all the different items on the page (including keywords in the Menu Anchor Text) influences the user to your page. Which is exactly what the Search Engine is looking for.

And that is why the Search Engine will include those words when it comes to calculating Keyword Density. Having a better understanding of the ranking process will help you better optimize your pages.

Caution:

Let me point out that Keyword Density is not a very hard marker. If 20% density makes sense to your customers(your human visitors), then by all means go ahead and have a greater density than 10%. This is just to be used as a hedge against an urge to stuff your page with keywords.

Tools:

One of the tools I use to find if I have a good keyword density on my pages is to use Google Webmasters tool where it shows me the entire list of words it found on my page. Also, the most important words that it finds are shown in the list.