Succeeding in SEO without focusing on keywords is tough. If you want to rank high on a search engine results page, your content, including title tags, must contain relevant keywords. However, to increase their reach, many site owners stuff keywords where they are not essential.
What is Keyword Density?
Keyword density in SEO means the number of times a particular phrase appears on your content. The density is calculated by dividing the frequency of a specific phrase by the total number of words used on the web page. Keyword density is important since it tells search engines whether you are stuffing keywords to manipulate the ranking.
What is the perfect keyword density for SEO?
You may have heard SEO experts warn against stuffing keywords. However, there are no rules on the minimum percentage of keywords you can use in specific content. Incorporating keywords one to two times per 100 words is a good practice. It means keywords density of 1% to 2% in content is acceptable.
Keep Your Keyword Density Calculator Handy
So how does a keyword calculator work? It’s a simple calculation that would give you the ratio or percentage of the keyword to your total word count.
This is how the keyword density formula works: (KWU/TWC)*100;
Where,
KWU= Keywords used
TWC= Total Word Count.
To put it in numbers, this is how the calculation would look like:
If your total keywords used would be 20 and total word count would be 1000; then the formula would be: (20/1000)*100
= 0.2*100= 2%
This would mean that your keyword density for a particular keyword or phrase is 2% of the total word count.
When you think about it, 2% seems like a rather small percentage. Is 2% enough and what should be the ideal ratio of keywords in any content?
Knowing the optimal keyword density helps you understand the benchmark ratio or percentage for ideal keyword density optimization.
Knowing the Optimal Keyword Density
There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to optimal keyword density as long as the keyword density percentage is healthy.
There are different schools of thought when it comes to optimal keyword density. For some, it ranges between 0.5% to 0.8%. Some experts would want this number to be higher; from 0.5% to 2.5%. However, most experts would agree that it should ideally be less than 3%.
This means for every 100 words that you use to describe your content, you need to use the keyword at least twice.