Keyword Density – What’s the magical ratio?

KEYWORDS… Yes, keywords that help your website rank well. Keywords that are used by the web visitors in the search engines to look for desired websites.

The keyword rich contents are both search engine friendly as well as user friendly. But, very often a question arises in our minds. What is ratio of keywords? Does it effect search engine optimization?

Well, keyword density is definitely an important factor. The judicious use of keywords is what really matters in improving ranking your website.

Keyword Density

In simple terms, keyword density is the total ratio of the keywords compared to the total number of words on the web page. For instance, a web page has total number of 100 words. The total number of keywords used is 3. Hence, the keyword density is 3%.

It may be used as defining means to identify keywords targeted for each page by the search engines. All search engine algorithms give importance to the number of keywords in a web page.

The keywords appears in the meta title, meta description, meta keywords, header text, body content, footer text, text links, anchor text, navigational links, footer links of a web page. The search engine robots classify a website through the keywords used in the web pages.

What is the ideal keyword density?

The concept of keyword density is very tricky. There is no cardinal rule as to what is the ideal figure of keywords in a web page.

It ‘s true that all search engines have diverse estimate of keywords. Diverse search engines permit a diverse keyword density in a web page. Some search engines allow a large amount of keyword density while some others have certain limits. As search engines modify their algorithms repeatedly so there is no fixed limit.

The ideal density of keywords largely depends on the keywords. In case of a highly competitive keyword, it is advisable to target one specific keyword for a single page. One can use more keywords in lesser important pages. It is ideal to put the most important keywords in the home page and then link to the other web pages in the website.

Opinions vary as to what should be the ideal number of keywords. To speak of the major search engines, Google’s limit on keyword density is 2% while MSN and Yahoo offer 5% keyword density. Ideally speaking, a website may opt between 1% to 5 % keyword density.

Final Crux
According to a top SEO agency India, keywords density is indeed an important factor but not the only determinant for ranking well in the search engines. Several factors including the on-page SEO efforts, quality of your content, link structure, domain authority, etc. effectively help to reach your desired goal.