If you've been in the SEO field long enough, you are most likely familiar with the term 'Keyword Density.' It is a fundamental concept which forms the basis of search engine optimization (SEO). It's essential to understand how exactly keyword density works because it has a significant impact on the visibility of your website on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Moreover, if ignored, it can adversely affect your website as well.
What is Keyword Density?
Keyword Density is the process of calculating the number of times your focused keyword has appeared on your website. It's the percentage of how frequently the focused keyword appeared compared to the entire content of that particular webpage.
How is Keyword Density Calculated?
It's relatively easy to calculate the density of a keyword in a document. There are two ways by which it can be calculated; the traditional calculation formula and the TF-IDF.
What is the Traditional Formula?
The traditional keyword formula entails dividing the total number of times a keyword has appeared on a website by the overall number of words on that page. The result of that equation would be the keyword density of that webpage.
The number of times the keyword appeared / the total number of words = Keyword Density.
To make it simple, let us assume your web page has 1000 words and the focused keyword has appeared 20 times, then 20 / 1000 would be the density of the keyword, which is 2%.
What is TF-IDF?
It is a modern method for text mining and information retrieval purposes and stands for "term frequency and inverse document frequency". It determines how relevant a particular term is for the entire content. Search Engines like Google has been using TF-IDF for a long time to rank the content based on its keyword frequency rather than just counting the words.
What is the Ideal Keyword Density?
It is difficult to determine the ideal density of keywords in a document since no definite rules guide the process. However, SEO experts believe that the perfect density should be around 1-2%. This would entail that a keyword should appear only once or twice every 100 words. This method seems to work because it shows the search engines what the content is about without keyword stuffing.
What is Keyword Stuffing?
Initially, when SEO was still emerging, there had been a black-hat SEO technique called Keyword Stuffing. It was the act in which the focused keyword was repeated repeatedly throughout the whole document to the point it felt out of place or somewhat unnatural to the readers.
Nowadays, this practice has ceased to be as relevant as it once was. That may be because cramming keywords in your webpage could lead to the opposite of your desired result; it could adversely affect your website and its rank in the SERPs.
