Understanding Myths and Best Practices

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the frequency with which a keyword appears on a webpage relative to the total word count.

Represented as a percentage, it’s calculated by dividing the number of times a keyword appears on a page by the total word count and multiplying the result by 100:

Does Keyword Density Matter for SEO?

Keyword density is no longer an important ranking factor.

When SEO was still an emerging field, the idea was that more keywords created more relevance and resulted in higher rankings.

Many SEO professionals focused on keyword density as a metric to improve their rankings. They would overload their content with target keywords to boost search rankings.

This is a practice known as keyword stuffing, where keywords are a case of quantity over quality.

Using keywords in this way now violates Google webmaster guidelines, which state:

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in Google Search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, unnaturally, or out of context.

As a result, keyword frequency or density on its own is no longer a key to SEO success.

Search engines are much more sophisticated today. Google and others have evolved to understand the content on a webpage beyond keyword density.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed this by responding to a question on Reddit about keyword density in 2021. The user asked directly if keyword density is a ranking...