It’s been a long, long time since we’ve looked at the keyword density of a page. But amazingly, there are many people out there who still think that putting a keyword in a page a certain number of times will lead to search engine ranking gold. Every now and then, I hear people ask about it, and you still see a lot of SEO tools that will look at the keyword density of a page. However, keyword density as a ranking metric is dead and gone.
The fact is, there is no such thing as the “right” amount of keyword usage for a “properly” optimized web page. With today’s algorithms, the keywords themselves play a far less significant role than they once did. Instead, algorithms lean more toward the overall topic of a page, looking not just for “keywords” but anything and everything that relates to the page’s topic.
Keywords still matter, both from a topical perspective as well as ensuring you write content that meets the needs of the searchers. But you won’t get very far looking to add each keyword X number of times for every word of content.
So, instead of talking about keyword density, what should your SEO be talking about? They should be focused on writing great content that fulfills the needs of the searcher. Not every article has to be the beginning and the end of a particular topic. In fact, every topic can be broken down into sub-topics. Each of those is an opportunity to write content that will be exactly what searchers are looking for.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Stay away from keyword density. Just write great content.[/inlinetweet] How many words do you need? How ever many is needed to do the job!
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