SEO Glossary: Keyword Density

 

What is keyword density?

The keyword density is a mathematical quotient. It indicates how often a search term is found within a text.

 

A website often contains SEO textsthat are to be optimized for a specific search term. The aim here is to show Google and other search engines what the text is specifically about. As a result, the page with the targeted keyword should rank higher in the SERPs.

 

The keyword density can help to get an overview of the number of search terms within a text. However, the density should never be too high. But more on that in a moment...

 

How is keyword density calculated?

A simple calculation is required to calculate the keyword density.

 

Here is an example:

 

A text with 1,000 words is used on a website on the topic of "4K televisions". The term "4K TV" is also the keyword with which the page is to be optimized. The keyword appears a total of 25 times in the text.

 

Formula:

 

(number of keywords in the text) x 100 / total number of words = keyword density in percent

25 x 100 / 1.000 = 2,5 %

As already mentioned, keyword density is the ratio of a keyword to the total number of words in a text or on a website.

 

However, the following should be noted: On the one hand, search engines analyze the text of a website. At the same time, however, they also analyze the source text, which is not visible to a normal website visitor. This means that various attributes such as title tags and ALT-TAGS must also be taken into account.

 

This means that keyword density can refer to both the visible text of a website and the complete source code. Consequently, no precise consensus can be found here.

What is the ideal keyword density?

Keyword density is just one of many factors that signal to search engines what a page is about. When it comes to keyword density, there is no exact value that proves to be ideal. However, many SEOs agree that a value between 3 and 5 percent is within an acceptable range.

 

But be careful: SEOs should never go too far and keep the keyword density within a natural range. If the number of keywords in a text is too high, the page can also be marked as spam. And this will result in a negative ranking.

 

To find out how high the keyword density is, use the formula above. Alternatively, there are also plenty of tools on the internet that calculate keyword density.