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Aug 11, 2015

[SEO Dictionary] Keyword Density

Keyword density is an old search engine optimization method that is no longer effective. It involved using a certain keyword – or multiple keywords – a certain number of times on one webpage.

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, keyword density was a viable SEO strategy. Many people wanted to use between 4 and 6 percent keyword density on each page. If your keyword was law firm marketing, for example, and you wrote a 200 word-article, that phrase would have to appear eight to 12 times. (For the record, this definition clocks in at 220 words. You can imagine how awkward it would be to read that same phrase repeatedly in a piece of this length.)

Misuse of keyword density was rampant. Webmasters were able to “game” the search engines and unfairly get clicks. Users were unhappy, so Google and other major search providers began to penalize websites that used keyword stuffing as an SEO technique.

With the development of smarter search engine crawling technology – particularly latent semantic indexing, which can interpret a page’s content in context – it is no longer necessary to use a certain keyword a certain number of times on a webpage.

In fact, attempting to reach a certain keyword density can trip a flag with the search engine’s crawlers that triggers a penalty for your website.

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