How many times should you include your main keyword in an article? You may already know that if you include your keyword it makes your webpage more relevant for that term, but did you know that only a few more occurrences of your keyword can actually harm your rankings in search?
This post may fly in the face of all that you’ve heard about including your keyword in an article to rank in search, but the last few Panda updates from Google seem to have affected keyword density as a ranking signal, so today I’d like to share my findings and also some insight directly from the Horse’s mouth.
You may be thinking this sounds counterintuitve – why would you want to put your keyword on your page less if you want it to appear more relevant for a given term? The short answer is, quality!
There is also a plane of diminishing returns, meaning that the first couple of times you include a keyword it may impact ranking signals but additional uses of the keyword do not do much at all to make your article seem more on-topic.
Further, there’s a negative side to keyword density where after “a certain number” of occurrences the inclusion of your keyword may negatively impact your relevance for a given term.
Keyword stuffing… It Hasn’t Worked Well For a Looooong Time
In the early days of Search Engines, some saavy folks figured out that if you included the same phrase over and over again on a page, you could often get it to rank for that particular term. What ended up happening is the search results soon became cluttered with pages containing large keyword lists and the amount of useful content being returned for a given search term began to diminish.
The search engines wanted it’s users to be happy and get useful results. They didn’t want to upset searchers by providing non-relevant content and so in early 2000′s they took a stand against keyword stuffing and began penalizing sites and removing offenders from the top page in search.
The magic question then became, what is the perfect keyword density? In other words, how many times should I include my keyword on the page?
A Rule Of Thumb For How Many Times To Include Your Keyword
Since Google does not share the inner workings of their search algorithm, no one can say for sure how it works. There is no ideal number but I find about 1.4% to be a good keyword density for a 500-750 word article. This ideal number used to be higher, up to as much as 2% or more but in the past 6 months I’ve noticed lowering the keyword density of certain articles actually improved my search rank.
How do I know this? Simple. I track my results. But Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team went on public record recently about this topic. Here’s a video of him explaining more on ideal keyword density.
The Importance Of Including Related Keywords With Your Article
I’m not going to attempt to explain LSI here, but Wikipedia defines it as a way to “identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text”.
From an SEP Standpoint, it’s worth noting that if you include related, contextual keywords in your article it can improve the relevance of your initial keyword term. Why? Because you’re helping the search spiders more contextually catalog your content.
Consider a website about the keyword “Apple”. With no other words to provide context, search spiders don’t know if our page is about the fruit or the company. Including other related words like “red”, “delicious” and “pits” will help clarify what your page was about in the eyes of the search engines.
Final Thoughts On Keyword Density
As Matt pointed out, a great way to see if you have “too many” occurrences of your keyword in an article is to have someone read it. If it reads ok to them, it probably is ok. But if you’re questioning if you’ve used your keyword too many times, you may want to use a tool like SEOPressor to monitor your keyword density as you author articles.
So what do you think? Is there such a thing as including your keyword too many times. Leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts.
