SEO glossary: Keyword density

What is the Keyword Density?

The keywords density (also called keyword density) is a mathematical quotient. It tells you 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.

 

Here, the keyword density can help to get an overview of the number of search terms within a text. However, the density should not be too high. But more about that in a moment...

 

 

How is the Keyword Density calculated?

To calculate the Keyword Density, a simple calculation is required.

 

Here is an example:

 

A text with 1,000 words is used on a website about "4K TV". 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 mentioned above, keyword density is the ratio of a keyword to the total number of words in a text or on a website.

 

However, there is the following to consider: On the one hand, search engines analyze the text of a website. At the same time, 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 here.

 

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 size of the ideal keyword phrase?

The keyword density is only one of many factors to signal to search engines what kind of topic a page is about. In terms of keyword density, there is also no exact value that is ideal. However, many SEOs agree that a value between 3 to 5 percent is in 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.