What does Keyword Density Mean?
The next thing we‘re going to talk about is keyword density, which is a pretty tricky term. It‘s different for Google and for bing, so I would suggest that you kind of strike a balance in between unless you‘re building two sites.
A lot of people will build two Web sites; one for Google and then build another site completely optimized for bing, which is a pretty good strategy if you‘re really looking to get all the traffic you can get. However, about 80% of the traffic comes from Google— only about 20% comes from Bing now— so you‘ve just got to make a determination if it‘s worth your time to go in and build a completely different site just to optimize for bing.
Let me talk to you about the keyword density rules as they apply today. It used to be that people would go into a Web site and just hammer it with keywords.
They‘d say, ―My site is about apples, so I‘m going to start out by saying, ̳This site is about apples. It‘s all about apples. Apples are great. Apples are wonderful. If you like apples, you‘re going to love my Web site about apples. This is the best apple Web site in the whole doggone apple world.
When Web sites were young and dumb, that totally worked. People could get keyword density of 15%, 16%, 17%, and 23%. I‘ve had it as high as 23% back in the day, and that would totally work. I‘d have the most keyword- dense site about what I was doing.
In the earlier stages of search engines, when Web sites like AltaVista were like the King Kong of search engines—and I know that probably 90% of the people reading this book don‘t even know
what Alta Vista is anymore— they were a meta search engine. So if you had good meta tags and good keywords and real high keyword density, they would rank you at the top. I rode the top of that search engine for a long time and made a whole lot of money.
Today, the process is considerably more sophisticated than that. All the SEO professionals I know agree that Google likes keyword density between two and five percent, with four percent probably being the safeguard area. bing likes keyword density between four and six percent. So, if you really want to try to walk the line between Google and bing, you probably want to be about 4.5% to maybe go as high as five percent keyword density on some of your articles.What I mean by keyword density is that your key phrase is used 4-6% of the time in your site on that particular page of content. What you have to consider is if you‘re using a phrase that‘s also embedded in other phrases.
For instance, if your keyword is ―pool table, every time you use it and you say ―pool table, or ―pool table chalk, or even ―pool chalk, that one word ―pool is used in chalk and in pool table, that‘s going to be counted in your keyword density.
So if you use either one of the words ―pool or ―table more than five percent, Google may think you are trying to put too much keyword density on a particular page.