SEO Myth – Google’s Maximum Keyword Density Percentage
Posted by admin on June, 24th 2010
What is Google’s Maximum Keyword Density? The simple answer is that there isn’t one!
So why is there so much fuss over keyword densities online? The answer lies within past spammy SEO techniques…
When Yahoo were the top search engine you could rank highly by simply adding every keyword you could think of within the Meta tags and on the main site. There would be the same keyword adding in hundreds of different variations across the top of bottom of the webpage (most people were doing this to win search results for the booming online sex industry).
Google came along and started ranking websites not for their keywords but for the number of backlinks they had from other sites (PageRank) but as the Google algorithm became smarter they started to weed out these sites with “keyword spam” i.e. ones where you could see the word “sex” appear over 100 times on one small page.
Google quotes to ‘write content for people and not for search engines‘ so many SEO’ers were testing the boundary for what percentage (density) of keywords would still work. Some say no more than 7% of the time should one keyword appear within the body text, others have said anywhere between 2% – 10%.
Times have changed again and it’s increasingly difficult to “fool” the search engines by mentioning the main keyword again and again. Now I don’t know how the algorithm works that spots keyword stuffing but I’m sure it has something to do with the grammatical structure of each sentence and the average keyword density of all sites within your region of the same subject.
If you were writing product information for let’s say an Umbrella then it would be very hard not to mention the word Umbrella again and again and again. It’s the same with talking about any main subject, when we talk about SEO here at Real Web SEO we mention the word ‘SEO’ a lot like within this sentence!
Also keyword density is nonsense if you think about it; a webpage with 100 words on it could mention the same word 10 times and get a keyword density of 10%. If the same keyword was mentioned 10 times on a webpage with 1000 words then it would have a keyword density of 1% yet Google may not think the page was very focused on one subject.
So you main aim should be: write well written and natural language on your site, stop worrying about keyword densities and spend that time writing more quality content.
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I think it makes sense, as your other SEO myth posts. I used to work in Google and I don’t think Google will rely on such simple ‘rule’ for penalty.
Posted by stan on 19 Mar 2011Percentages especially are a bit flimsy I think, it’s not a reliable figure to use.
I could say that I improved traffic to a website to 600% of it’s original which sounds impressive but it could mean the visits went from as little as 1 visit/day to 6 visits/day!
Posted by admin on 23 Mar 2011Thanks for this post — I have someone driving me a bit batty about a website because two SEOs told them 1-2% keyword density is the thing to shoot for. Anything more and Google will slap your wrist with a ruler – anything less and google will ignore the keyword.
I wish there was something I could do to change their mind – there are much better SEO ideas I could be focused on instead of re-writting near flawless content to hit that mystery sweet spot of 1-2%.
Posted by Nicole on 10 May 2011Thanks!
Posted by Seo1 on 10 Oct 2011