Many things play a part in your search engine success. Keywords are only a part of your search engine optimisation plan. They are still an important part, however, and it’s vital that you know what to do with them.

Hiring an SEO consultant can provide you with the help needed to deal with keywords in the initial stages of SEO, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult. As time goes on and you need to post SEO content to maintain your rankings, you’re likely to need to deal with keywords yourself. When that time comes, you need to know where to put keywords, and more importantly, how many keywords will trip the search engine spam filters.

SEO experts usually talk about keyword density. In doing this, they’re leading you slightly astray. The keyword density amount doesn’t change no matter how long your piece of content is, and yet when most experts talk about keywords they state a number of times you should put them in your content. What they’re getting confused is keyword density and keyword frequency.

Keyword density is a percentage

The keyword density of a piece of content is the number of keywords compared to the number of other words in a piece of content. It’s usually expressed as a percentage, so for example if a 100-word piece has three instances of the keyword ‘dogs’, the keyword density is 3%. Note that the number of words in the keyword affects the density as well, so for example if the keyword was ‘dog food’, the keyword density is 6%. It is thought that Google and the other search engines measure keyword density and have a filter if the density is over a certain limit. This may be why the SEO industry talks about density, but it isn’t helpful from a site owner’s perspective.

Keyword frequency is more what you need

Keyword frequency is the number of keywords in the content, regardless of how long that content or the keyword is. For example, if the keyword ‘gold watch sale’ was in a 100-word piece of content three times, the keyword frequency would be three. If it was in a 200-word piece of content, it would still be three.

Using keyword frequency as a measurement is less accurate than keyword density, but it’s a much easier measure for site owners to follow. Most search engine optimisation experts recommend a keyword frequency of two or three every 250 words.

It would be a wonderful world if some clever SEO expert could figure out the perfect keyword density and every site owner could apply it. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen. This is first of all because the search engines protect their optimum keyword density figures vigorously, and no-one could blame them. However, even if an SEO genius stumbled upon the scene that could reverse-engineer the search engine algorithms to produce an exact density, it still wouldn’t work. Most people aren’t going to sit down and figure out the percentages of keywords in their content. Keyword frequency is a much more friendly approach.

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