Are you dense, buddy?

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.

The spider then calculates the total number of words on the page to see how often the keyword phrases have been repeated. Every spider might have its own idea about what is a good percentage to have for keyword counts with respect to the total number of words.

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?

Contd. on page 2.