May 09
17
The Merits of Keyword Density (or Not)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be much easier. Prior to November of 2003 (when Google made an important change to their search engine), a workable solution to getting higher rankings was to add more keywords to your pages, even if a repetitive string of keywords appeared nonsensical to a human reader.
Google needed to make that change in 2003 or else all the top ranking pages would end up being written only for machines and would be valueless to actual visitors.
However, even nowadays, you’ll still find some SEO consultants and SEO training courses that advocate the importance of “High Keyword Density” in your copy.
Of course you want to include keywords in your content, but even more important are off-page factors such as links pointing to your web pages, and how those links describe your pages.
In other words, if some links to your website are described as “Click Here,” they’re not describing your site very well. However, if they link to your site using keywords descriptions of your site and/or specific pages, then that is a very important signal to Google as to what your website is about.
More to the point of this article, counting keywords or measuring densities is not the most fruitful way to increase your search performance: at least not in this day and age. (Furthermore, you could be providing your actual visitors with a poor reading experience if you have too many repetitive words).
