How to calculate your Keyword Density for SEO content.

The subject of Keywords & Keyword Density is a talking point amongst SEO gurus worldwide and each has a different opinion of the right way to approach keyword density and how to deploy keywords throughout your content properly. The reason for the different opinions (and almost every SEO expert has his/her own opinion about the “right way” to do keyword optimizing) is that the ranking rules used by the Search Engines are a well kept secret. We honestly do not know an absolute way to use keywords the right way … we can really only guess.

In the early days of the modern Internet (say, the mid-to-late nineties), the Search Engines used keywords and their keyword density within the content of a web page as a very important website ranking factors – that is, the more times a particular keyword or phrase appeared in the content of a website, the more likely that the website would rank well for a search of that keyword or phrase. If a web-page had an enormous number of instances of the word “TEA, then the search engines made the decision “This website is about TEA” and that website would rank very well when someone searched for “TEA”.

These days, keywords are not such important factors and have fallen behind the significance of a large number of inbound links to your site but keywords remain a factor none-the-less. In fact, a great deal of your S.E.O. efforts revolve around keywords; they are truly the foundation of any SEO work that you do.
However, your understanding and ability to calculate your keyword density is very useful for your work as an SEO marketer. It will allow you to make informed decisions about the content on your website and how to manipulate and optimize it for better ranking in the search engines.

There are automated tools for calculating keyword density it’s always best to understand the inner workings of keyword density, so you can make decisions about how to structure your content for yourself.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

Keyword density is a little bit of a tightrope walk. Too low a keyword density and your keywords will have little (or almost no) significance to your search engine ranking. Too high a keyword density and you may be penalized by the search engines for “keyword stuffing” (that is they will lower your placement in the search engine results pages because you have used a keyword way too many times for it to simply be a coincidence).

Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1% to 3% percent and Google documentation states that your keyword density for any keyword or phrase should be less than 5%. You must make your own decisions about what is right for you but it seems like a keyword density of around 2%-3% is just right.

Here I am going to show you how to calculate your keyword density and help you optimize your website. There will be a little bit of mathematics involved but nothing more complicated than a little multiplication and division. How you calculate your keyword density relies heavily on the circumstance in which you are using your keywords.

To calculate keyword density in its simplest form, you divide the number of times that you have used a specific keyword by the total number of words in the text that you are analyzing and multiply the result by one hundred to achieve your percentage.
Therefore:
Keyword Density = (abc/ xyz) x 100
Where:
Density = your keyword density
abc= how many times you repeated a specific keyword
xyz = total words in the analyzed text
So, if your article or piece of content (the text you are analyzing) is 500 words in length and you have used your keyword 15 times, the keyword density for that keyword is…
Keyword density = (abc/ xyz) x 100
= (15 / 500) x 100
= 0.03 x 100
=3
Keyword density = 3% !!!

That’s pretty straight-forward ?

Key-phrases add a new level of complexity to the keyword density issue. People don’t only search for one word when they perform searches on the internet. They may use a phrase which contains more than one word. Users will search terms that contain more than one word usually because they are looking for something specific.

If I were in search of a good restaurant in my area (believe me, not such a crazy idea) I wouldn’t just search the keyword “restaurant” in Google… This would return me a list of millions of results. I would instead search something like “restaurant in Mumbai”.
“restaurant in Mumbai” is an example of a key-phrase because it consists of more than one word as opposed to a keyword which is a single word.

So, someone trying to cater to my search would possibly try and optimize their content for that key-phrase – “restaurant in Mumbai” and they would try and fine-tune the density of the key phrase to that coveted 1% – 3% range.

This changes the calculation that we must perform to calculate our keyword density, because now we are dealing with an entity that contains multiple terms.
This presents an interesting dilemma. To work out the keyword density of a key phrase, it could be tempting to use:

Density = (abc x (jkl / xyz)) x 100
Where:
Density = your keyword density
abc = how many times you repeated a specific key-phrase
jkl = number of words in your key-phrase
xyz = total words in the analyzed text
So, again, if we take my “restaurant in Mumbai” example – There are three words in my key-phrase and I have used that key-phrase three times amidst my total word count of 500 words.

Density = (abcx (jkl / xyz)) x 100
= (3 x (3 / 500)) x 100
= (3 x 0.006) x 100
= 0.018 x 100
Density = 1.8%

There is a problem with this keyword density formula, however. One cannot ignore the fact that keyword density refers to the frequency of the appearance of one particular keyword. This means that “restaurant in Mumbai” should be counted as if it was just one word amongst the rest of your text and not three words.
This idea brings us back to our original formula, Keyword Density = (abc/ xyz) x 100, and doing the calculation above gives us:
=(3 / 500) x 100
=0.006 x 100

=0.6%
Which is a little low and very different. If you were using this formula to calculate your keyword density, you would want to add a few more instances of “restaurant in Mumbai”

Share your views on this article to Author Mr.Prakash Bhosale at info@ebrandingindia.com