Keyword Density Importance: The Truth Of The Matter

If you’re a new, diligent blogger, chances are you’ve heard the statement “Content is king” countless times already.

And so you, with your creative mind and entertaining writing skills, continue to produce high-quality content consistently on your blog.

You’re happy and satisfied—until you hear the words “search engine optimization” and the alien phrase “keyword density,” and how they’re supposed to actually direct readers to your website.

Now you’re confused.

Whatever happened to content being king—why the need to optimize your keywords and engineer your posts to please search engines anyway?

Can’t your content just naturally attract your targeted readers?

Keyword Density, Defined

The talk of keywords is always involved in any SEO action-planning.

The idea is that your entire blog article should revolve around a certain keyword or keywords that you strategically place throughout your content in order for search engine robots to index your website.

You want your website listed because only legitimate, listed sites are churned out by search engines whenever someone makes a search for the keyword you’re targeting.

And with having targeted keywords comes the question about keyword density—how many times should you repeat your keywords throughout your blog content to make it top the search engine lists?

Keyword Density, According to Experts

While internet marketing experts have varying opinions regarding keyword density, their statements can all be summed up into one observation: keyword density matters a lot for websites in new niches, but it doesn’t play a big role among websites within very competitive niches.

New Niches, High Keyword Density

Let’s say your website is about skull picture frames, and let’s assume further that this is a fairly new niche without a lot of websites to compete against for customer attention.

In this case, having the standard 1-3% keyword density comes into play, as the search engines won’t actually take long to course through the few websites with these keywords—they’ll quickly come up with a short list of keyword-rich websites, yours included.

Use the Google Keyword Tool to find out if your chosen niche is a fairly new one, and adjust your keyword density accordingly.

Competitive Niches, Insignificant Keyword Density

As if keyword density isn’t technical enough, here’s more—SEO doesn’t only pertain to keywords. When it comes to combing through high-competition websites, search engine bots actually use other ways to rank websites—backlinking and referencing being two of these methods.

In this case, keyword density almost becomes negligible—just mention your keyword once in your article, and spend the rest of your time creating backlinks to authority websites. Of course, make sure that you’re sending readers back to a content-rich website by also working on the quality of your posts.

Keyword Density, Dissected

If you’ve assessed that your website needs some serious keyword density work done, you’ve got to determine which search engine you would want your website to be ranked high.

SEO Hacker’s Sean Si discusses that the ideal keyword density for Yahoo seems to be about 3%, while a keyword density 1-2% is good to go for Google. To get the most out of putting keywords, Aaron Wall of SEOBook suggests that you place your target keywords at the start of your article title, your h1 tag, and the last paragraph.

Google ranks this method higher than if you randomly put your keywords at odd places in the text.

Keyword Density vs. Keyword Position

It’s never a good idea to place a lot of keywords in your article text. What actually makes a difference is the positioning of those keywords—it is more than enough to place them in your tags, title, and meta description for your website to be recognized and ranked by Google.

Conclusion

Most importantly, though, never get too caught up with having the keywords placed just right. A high-quality and unique content always attracts readers and makes them repost your awesome content.

Strive to create content that is repost-worthy, and you’ll see traffic spikes on your website stats in no time.