Is Keyword Density Important?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Is keyword density important?

This is the one question content marketers always ask when writing articles, blog posts, and copy used to promote their websites.

Anyone who’s done SEO and online marketing knows that keywords play a very critical role in ranking high in Google. That’s why these people spend a lot of time identifying the right keywords and putting them in their content.

Why is keyword density a huge concern for online marketers?

This is a huge concern because online marketers want every page that is related to their website to rank high in Google and other search engines. Every web page, article, and blog post has to have a high placement in results pages so they’ll have a better chance of getting seen, clicked, and read by people.

Content, articles to be more specific, that uses keywords properly has a better shot in getting search engines to index it. That means keywords need to appear in certain places and at a certain frequency in each article.

An article will mention one keyword several times. The frequency of the keyword is what’s called keyword density. It’s the ratio of the keyword to the number of texts in the article. If a 500-word article mentions the keyword 5 times, then the density is 5%, meaning the keyword is mentioned once in every 100 words.

Is keyword density still important?

Keyword density used to be important to a lot of writers and online marketers because it increases the chances of getting ranked in the search engines. However, there is a danger of keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing happens when you put in too many keywords in the article for the sake of increasing keyword density to get better ranking. This is bad because it makes the article look bad. When there are too many keywords in an article, it does not read naturally. There’s a possibility that readers will get annoyed by the constant mention of keywords.

Keyword stuffing is considered spamming. Google hates spamming.

You figure out what happens next.

This is why a lot of writers and online marketers these days think twice about sticking to keyword density. Unlike before, search engines are stricter with keyword use. They can now easily identify stuff that has unnatural keyword placement. They penalize content that has exaggerated keyword placement and either demote the site or remove it from their index.

That’s the last thing you want to happen to your web pages.

This is the reason a lot of people no longer think that keyword density is still important

It’s not as effective as before. Today, the only thing that matters is that the keywords appear naturally in the article. Search engines are smart. They know when something has unnatural keyword placement.

You won’t get the results you want if you stuff your articles with keywords. Don’t follow keyword density anymore. It’s just a waste of time.

Here’s something that will not waste your time. Check out these helpful marketing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and get your web pages ranked higher in search engines quicker.