For many, SEO, keywords, and keyword density seems to be a complicated topic. This could be because of the various methods that go in an SEO campaign. Be it off-page SEO or keyword research, a digital marketing strategy is simply incomplete without factoring in SEO.
Irrespective of the technique used, one thing is crucial. You simply cannot hope to stuff keywords and hope to receive the qualified traffic you are looking for.
Why is keyword essential for content?
Why can’t we just focus on blogging? Also, why do we need to focus on being visible to search engines, or giving so much thought to search engine visibility?
The answer lies in the fact that for your blog to serve helpful information, it has to be first visible to search engines. Only when readers know of your existence will they come to your site. For this, SEO is an important technique.
Gone are the days when keyword stuffing used to bring high volume traffic. With Google Panda and Penguin updates, the emphasis is on presenting content that is useful, relevant, and meaningful.
In this endeavour, good quality content and SEO will lead to better organic search results. You need not delve deep into the realm of SEO. Understanding the basics and using it well can lead you to the results you are looking for.
For content writing companies that want to know more about keyword density here is a quick and easy guide.
Keyword Density – The Most Important Aspect to Acing SEO
In an ocean full of things to look at, when it comes to acing your SEO strategy online, there is but one that can actually yield the best results. And that is Keyword density. If you happen to pay attention to just this one facet of SEO, you can make your content rank relatively well.
What Is Keyword Density?
Simply put, keyword density is overall percentage of the number of times a keyword appears on a page, which is then divided by the total number of words on that particular page.
If the content you post has, say 100 words, and you happen to use a particular keyword 4 times, then your keyword density would be 4%. If your business is regarding “oak wood furniture”, then you should ideally be using that phrase four times throughout your text, of course in a tactful manner so that it doesn’t look forced or weird.
Since there is no real threshold to keyword density, people choose to abide by keyword density percentages that suit them.
An industry accepted standard is 1.5% to 3% keyword density.
The formula for this is
1 – (Total occurrences of keywords / total words) * 100.
So, if your 500 word blog has the keyword ‘SEO’ occurring 6 times the result would be
(6/500)*100 = 1.2% keyword density
Now, if there are more than one word in the keyword phrase then the formula is
2 – (Total occurrences of keywords*Total words in phrase / total words) * 100.
So, if your 500 word blog has the keyword ‘Search Engine Optimization’ occurring 4 times the result would be
(4*3/500)*100 = 2.4% keyword density
Why Should I Really Bother About Keywords?
This query may come up from time to time. To answer this, you would have to understand the web to be literally that – a spider web.
Search engines are like spiders, crawling all over the web, trying to spot interesting and relevant bits of information that they can procure whenever the user demands it.
Hence, the algorithms a search engine deploys to spot information are quite actually called Crawlers.
The real reason behind placing keywords in your content is to make it easier for crawlers to spot your content on the World Wide Web.
If you have been able to do that well, then the search engine crawlers would be better able to spot your content, and your website would thereby rank well on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
What Drives Search Engine Crawlers?
Fancy as it all may seem to be, it is not hard to figure out. Every user out there would appreciate getting accurate results whenever they run a search. This accuracy is determined by relevance.
The basic idea is to provide relevant information to the user. And that is the end goal of search engine results. In order to make things simpler for search engine crawlers to spot your content, you tactfully plant keywords.
So, What Is The Ideal Keyword Density To Optimize Content?
Since it is hard to clearly define what the crawlers are looking out for, it is hard to determine a concrete figure as the ideal keyword density to work towards.
There is no specific guideline out there to help you out with this figure, nor is there any statistics to help you estimate the right keyword density number.
However, the only thing you need to beware of is keyword stuffing.
Keyword Stuffing – The SEO Villain
Back in the day when SEO was a budding concept, some people with a dire need to make pages rank well resorted to an unfair mean of ranking, and that is Keyword stuffing.
Experts today agree that keywords are an important part of SEO content writing skills. Hence, they recommend not stuffing the content, to ensure proper readability and maintain the informative nature of the blog.
Keyword stuffing is the unfair practice of cramming as many relevant keywords onto a page as possible. It goes to such an extent that it stops feeling natural and appears to be more of a force-fit.
Over the years, as search engine algorithms developed, keyword stuffing as a practice came to light. Currently, search engine crawlers are programmed to abhor keyword stuffing.
How Do I Know If I Am Stuffing Keywords?
When you are focused on using a specific phrase throughout your content, you tend to use it far more than you intended to, and that is absolutely natural. Use online tools like a Keyword density calculator to be able to determine the keyword density of your content.
As healthy practice, try to go for keyword density of anywhere between 1.5-3%.
The best places to place your keywords are:
- The Permalink
- H1 Tag
- H2 Tag
- Start of the Article
- End of the Article
- Adding high-quality images and using target keywords as anchor texts
To conclude
Once you practice this ideal practice of Keyword density, you subject your website and the content you push out to better SEO rankings.
Are you facing an issue weaving in keywords naturally into your content? Bring on-board a reliable content writing company like Textuar to derive max gains from this objective and propel your SEO program ahead.
