How to calculate the keywords density of your website
14 April 2010
Once you have decided which keywords your webpage should target, written the right content, placed your keywords in the correct tags in a meaningful way without spamming search engines, it's time to check your keywords density.
What's a keyword density?
- keywords density
- The keywords density is the number of times your keywords appear in the different elements of your webpage, based on the total number of words.
Nobody really knows what the right density to be considered relevant is. Search engines jealously guard this secret. However, a rate of 3% to 5% keyword density is a reasonable target.
Which tool to use to calculate the keyword density?
There are several tools you could use, but I recommend the free tool KeywordDensity.com .
- HTML: this column lists of HTML element where the keywords and other words that have been counted appear.
- Keywords: this column lists the number of occurrences of the keywords you specified you are targeting.
- Total: this column lists the total number of words.
- Finally, the % column lists the percentage of keywords against the total number of words.
The nicest feature of this tool is that the figures are broken down by type of HTML "elements". You will need to have some notions of HTML to make the most of this tool, as it splits the keywords density by HTML element where they can be found.
Clarifications on the keyword density breakdown by HTML "element"
Some of the "element" types may not be immediately obvious:
- Title: The title tag of your header. It gets displayed in the browser top bar.
- Meta_Description: The one or two sentences that description your page in a meta tag.
- Meta_Keywords: The meta tag that lists your keywords, separated by commas, in the header part of your webpage.
- Visible_Text: The text actually displayed to your browsers. This doesn't include any of the "hidden" text that only crawlers can see.
- Alt_Tags: An alt tag is really an alt attribute, as found in an image element.
- Comment_Tags: It's debatable whether including keywords in HTML comments is a good idea. Ideally, your webpage HTML should have been cleaned up and optimized for speed and not contain any HTML comments at all. HTML comments are <!-- this is an HTML comment >
- Domain_Name: The domain name of your website, that one is pretty self-explanatory.
- Image_tags: The URL of your image files.
- Linked_Text: The text that is displayed by links.
- Option Tags: An option is a member of a drop-down list in a form.
- Reference_Tags: That's the href attribute of links. Note that this row isn't counting the text of a link but evaluates the actual URL.
Note: Once you run a report, you can re-run a new report from the result page. Make sure you check Raw Data Comparison to have the same level of details as the default report you first ran from the homepage.
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