Keyword Density
So, what is the good number for keyword Density?
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: