Keyword Density for Newbies

In past articles, we've discussed the importance and methods of choosing the right keywords for your site and your niche market.

Keywords are the phrases that search engines use to categorize your site for future reference when someone is searching in your niche market.

Now, we've already learned that we need to put our keywords not only in our meta tags, but also in other important tags located in our HTML code. Another important on-page factor is peppering your keywords throughout your content.

This serves a couple purposes.

First, it backs up your claim to the search engines that your site is truly about what you say it's about. So, should I quantify "peppering?"

Actually, the technical term is called "keyword density," and its mathematical equation is the percentage of keywords included in the total content of your page.

You see, years ago when keywords were introduced as a strategic way to get your site seen in the search engine results, people would use their keywords over and over and over in their meta tags. This has been deemed "keyword stuffing" and the search engines disapprove highly of such use.

The mentality was, the more keywords you had in your pages, the higher you'd be in the search engine results. This extreme usage of keyword density now can actually work against you so much it can lead to your site getting "black listed" by the search engines.

It is as bad as it sounds!

So, what exactly IS the best keyword density in your web pages? Well, as far as content goes, the words people can see on your site should have between 3-7% keyword density.

As far as the words the search engines see but your visitors can't, it's important that you use your comment and alt tags to increase your keyword density if your visible content falls a little short.

Now, other than in your content, where else should you be concerned about your keyword density?

A perfect example is in an article such as this one. This article is to raise awareness of the keyword tool we're promoting. We write articles such as these to teach people about the importance of keywords in their internet marketing.

Each article focuses on keyword density for one of our keywords. One of our keywords is, in fact, keyword density! So, when writing this article, we make sure to have that phrase scattered throughout the article, staying within the guidelines I've listed above.

As it turns out, the keyword density of the visible content in this particular article is 2.7%. So, we would have to include the phrase in our comment tags to bring up the ratio to the percentage range listed earlier in this article.

Okay. So, now that we've gone over the importance of keyword density, in our next article let's discuss why we need to write articles, what anchor tags are, and why they are important to our overall keyword marketing strategy.