12
Sep

Understanding Keyword Density

Author: Jerry Iannucci

Today I took my cat to the vet for his annual booster shots. He’s only 2 so this was really only his second trip to the vet since I got him. His first visit was a year ago and it was a total disaster. He moaned at me the entire ride to the vet and then we got stuck in the waiting room for 30 minutes. We almost made it all the way back home before he peed all over himself in the carrier. Needless to say he was not too fond of the experience.

When I got the pet carrier out today he wanted nothing to do with it. After about an hour of pleading and trying to trick him into getting inside by himself it came down to a wrestling match that I eventually won.

The 20 minute drive sucked. He moaned the entire way and for awhile it looked like he was going to start hyperventilating. We finally got to the clinic… and they were closed! Son of a… It seems the doctor had a personal emergency and could not come in today. Nooo!

So, I get to try again on Tuesday. I’m sure Sydney (my cat) will be thrilled.

In the mean time… how about some keyword tips?

Yep, keywords. Gotta love them. The search engines sure do. That is why it is important to understand how to use keyword density on your pages the correct way.

Keyword density is a way to gauge how often a selected keyword appears on your page. Keep in mind that keywords should not be over used. There should be just enough keywords to appear at all the important places in your content.

Don’t use keywords too often! If you decide to just stuff your pages with keywords then your site will most likely be rejected by the search engines because they think you are trying to cheat them.

Keyword density is expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Let’s say you have 100 words on your page (not counting all the html code in the source file) and your keyword appears five times in your content. You can calculate the keyword density on that page by dividing the total number of keywords by the total number of words on your page. In this case it would be 5 divided by 100 which is .05. Since keyword density is a percentage you would multiply that number by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

Your goal should be to try and keep your keyword density between 3% and 5%. This should get you recognized by the search engines without making it appear that you are trying to spam them.

Here’s an easy way to check the keyword density of your page:

Copy and paste the content from your page into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word.

Go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Select All”.

Now click on “Tools” menu and select “Word Count”. Write down the total number of words in the page.

Now select the “Find” function on the ‘Edit’ menu and do a search for your keyword. Use the “Next” option to find all the occurrences of your keyword.

With the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now figure out the keyword density of your page. Ta-da!

Hope that helps.

Now I am going to go play with Sydney. He had a stressful day and needs to unwind with some string.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 2:48 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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