keyword density

The Keyword Density is a term of search engine optimization and indicates in percent how often the keyword appears in the text or the document.

Definition

Keyword Density is a percentage measure of how often the keyword appears in a text or document. It is calculated from the number of all words and the frequency of the keyword. A text with 100 words, in which the keyword occurs 3 times, has a keyword density of 3 percent.

The term comes from search engine optimization (SEO) and is a part of OnPage optimization. For a page to get a good position on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), it is good if the content of the page has a balanced keyword density.

Why do search engines need keywords?

Search engines cannot read texts like users can – in order to evaluate their content they depend on the analysis of keywords from which the crawler can conclude for which search query a page is interesting. You can think of the system as a glossary: The user of a search engine enters a search term and based on the keywords (and many other factors) the search engine algorithm determines how relevant a page is for this query.

So that texts are not automatically presented at the top, which simply have the highest keyword density, the search engine Google classifies texts with a too high keyword density (from about 8% it becomes critical) as spam. If Google suspects so-called keyword stuffing, the webmaster of the page receives a notice in Google Search Console – provided that the page is registered in this tool.

Is there an ideal keyword density?

Because the use of keywords invites spamming or other abuse, the importance of keyword density to Google is increasingly declining. Once the BERT update goes online in Germany, it will probably be even less relevant.

In SEO circles, it is believed that a good keyword density is between three and seven percent. But targeting a text for optimal keyword density should not be the goal of search engine optimization. It is more important to write good and exciting content that invites users to visit your site again and recommend it to others. Not only does this improve KPIs like bounce rate and page impressions, but it’s the easiest and most natural way to generate backlinks.

Today, keyword density is mainly important to avoid being ranked negatively by Google.

Conclusion

The Keyword Density shows in percent how often a key term of a text appears. It used to be an important metric for search engines to rank a page. Because it is very inviting to abuse, it is no longer so important today – especially to avoid the impression of keyword stuffing in the reverse.

More important than a text with a high number of keywords, is a reader-friendly text that invites users to visit the page again.