In the early days of search engines keyword density was an important factor on how a page was ranked, these days keyword stuffing can penalise your webpage.
The keywords you choose to target should sum up the content of the page, and it is this that determines whether a search engine bot will index your site. If the context of the page is irrelevant to your keywords you can wave that page goodbye as it will not be found in search results.
Search engines are getting clever and they can filter out websites that are stuffed with words that hold no relevance. Search engine bots relish social media because it is written in natural speech with context. Writing text as if you are talking to a friend will increase the quality of your content than if you were writing a sales pitch. So what is the right keyword density for SEO?
Erm, the answer is there is no right answer to this question!
Keyword density varies between different search engines. Yahoo recommends 3% where Google likes 1-2% keyword density. Position of keywords can also play a part. If you take two articles with the same keyword density they could be filtered differently by search engines simply because of the position of the keywords. If one of the articles had keywords at the beginning, in the title and as the h1 tag it would be indexed higher than the article that had the same amount of keywords but used sporadically throughout the text.
Keyword presence and position are more important than keyword density. Putting keywords in titles, Meta tags and descriptions will help give search engines an idea to the content of the page.
Website content should be written for readers and search engines. Writing content that reads exceptionally well for your site visitors is one thing, but they need to be able to see your site in the first place, and they won’t be able to do that if your site isn’t found. Search engines are a mechanism to promote your site, so don’t fight against it, use it to its full potential and always keep in mind ‘will Google like that?’.
See how well your website rates for keyword density with this free online keyword density analyser tool, you might be surprised at the results!