Keywords density: how important is it to your website search engine optimization?
13 April 2010
I'm working with Andrea Holley from Culture Guide on how to optimize her website for search engines. Culture Guide helps people who want to relocate to Brighton with integrating in the English culture. One of the challenges in writing optimized copy for a website is to hit a sufficient keywords density while still conveying relevant information that reads well and sounds natural.
Plural and singular versions of the same target keyword
The plural variation of a word counts, so "relocations" and "relocation" both contribute to the target "relocation", however "relocate" doesn't, at least not directly. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use a mix of "relocation", "relocate" and "relocated" in your webpage.
Variations of a single target keyword all help support the readability and findability of a webpage
It's very important to use a mixture of variations on the same target keywords, even if these variations are not hitting a 3% to 5% target density. These variations are still supporting the main keyword target. Using only a single word with no variation misses the searches on these variations. Even if most people search on "relocation" there are still a large number of people who search on "relocate".
Source: Google Search Insight
Keyword density in light of target semantic field
Moreover, search engines have very clever algorithms that will measure the semantic field of words (i.e. words belonging to the same family of words). It is therefore vital to use a broad range of words from the same family of words as the main target keyword.
What I recommend you do is to pick one word per page and make sure you hit 3% to 5% on that word. Hitting 2 words at %3 to 5% each on the same page is very tricky. Don't worry about the density of the variations; just make sure that you use them wherever it feels natural to do so.
Keywords density is not everything
Finally, don't forget to step back from your copy and have someone else read it without any warning on what they should be looking for. Ask that person if your optimized copy reads well, sounds natural and is informative. If you can both hit a keyword at 3% to 5% density and write good copy, then you can move on to optimizing the next page.
Dr E. Garcia wrote an in-depth essay about keywords density in 2005. Dr E. Garcia criticises the habit of some search engine optimizers to focus too much on keywords density and some of her points are still valid today. It's true that keyword density is not the only measure of relevance for a webpage: where the keywords are used, i.e. in which HTML element, and the distance between these words are also important. There are also many parameters that are taken into account and that only search engines know about. These parameters also regularly change over time. Keyword density is only a rough indicator of relevance and one of the ways to attempt making a webpage rank high in search engines. The only way to really know if a copy is good is to ask yourself: "Would someone I don't know like my webpage so much that they would link to it just because they find it useful and interesting?"
A note on homepage keyword density
Your homepage shouldn't try to hit all the keywords relevant to your website: leave that to other pages. Trying to hit too many keywords on any single page and writing good copy is impossible and unadvisable.
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