Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "Organ ...
, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is
relevant
Relevant is something directly related, connected or pertinent to a topic; it may also mean something that is current.
Relevant may also refer to:
* Relevant operator, a concept in physics, see renormalization group
* Relevant, Ain, a commune ...
to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.
In the late 1990s, the early days of
search engines
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
, keyword density was an important factor in page ranking. However, as
webmasters
A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites. The title may refer to web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website owners, website coordinators, or website publishers.
The duties of ...
discovered how to implement optimum keyword density, search engines began giving priority to other factors beyond the direct control of webmasters. Today, the overuse of keywords, a practice called
keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique, considered webspam or spamdexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page's meta tags, visible content, or backlink anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage ...
, will cause a web page to be penalized.
The formula to calculate your keyword density on a web page for SEO purposes is
, where Nkr is how many times you repeated a ''specific keyword,'' and Tkn the ''total words'' in the analyzed text. The result is a keyword density value. When calculating keyword density, ignore html tags and other embedded tags which will not appear in the text of the page once published.
When calculating the density of a keyword phrase, the formula would be
,
where Nwp is the number of words in the phrase. So, for example, for a four-hundred word page about search engine optimization where "search engine optimization" is used four times, the keyword phrase density is (4*3/400)*100 or 3 percent.
From a mathematical viewpoint, the original concept of keyword density refers to the frequency (Nkr) of appearance of a keyword in a dissertation. A "keyword" consisting of multiple terms, e.g. "blue suede shoes," is an entity in itself. T frequency of the phrase "blue suede shoes" within a dissertation drives the key(phrase) density. It is "more" mathematically correct for a "keyphrase" to be calculated just like the original calculation, but considering the word group, "blue suede shoes," as a single appearance, not three:
Density = ( Nkr / Tkn ) * 100.
'Keywords' (kr) that consist of several words artificially inflate the total word count of the dissertation. The purest mathematical representation should adjust the total word count (Tkn) lower by removing the excess key(phrase) word counts from the total:
Density = ( Nkr / ( Tkn -( Nkr * ( Nwp-1 ) ) ) ) * 100.
where Nwp = the number of terms in the keyphrase.
See also
*
Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
References
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Search engine optimization