Keyword Density Vs. Keyword Relevance

Keyword density simply means how many times a keyword or key phrase is listed on a page of a website.  The question is what is the correct keyword density a marketer should use when optimizing their website for the search engines and is keyword density the most important thing?

While some say that 2% to 8% is the ideal density of keywords for SEO purposes. Others claim that optimum density for Google specifically is 2% and that anything higher will result in your site being penalized. For Yahoo and MSN, I've also heard that 5% keyword density is the limit. But is this really the case?

In my experience investigating SEO techniques, most Internet marketers have been pushing the high end of the spectrum with keyword seeding density at 10% or higher. Now, if Google, which happens to be the most popular search engine in the Internet, does indeed penalize websites with keywords seeded at more than 2%, don’t you think that it’s senseless for people to be doing this?

Since Google, Yahoo and MSN began incorporating relevance of keywords to the actual content into their web crawlers. Keyword density, which was the main focus of web masters at that time, became a secondary consideration.

Unfortunately, some web masters and Internet marketers still stress keyword importance over content relevance. For example, the words “book”, “car” and “shopping” are most commonly used in Internet searches. If you had those words in your site, you have a guaranteed hit. This system would work before. You could use sex as a keyword, but your website actually contains information about potato farming.

This system of keyword importance and density lead to misleading search results. Because of the decrease in serviceability of search engines due to the abusers of the system, search engine operators decided to add the value of keyword relevance to actual content to better their service to Internet surfers. So if you are talking about potato farming and scatter the word sex all throughout your article just to attract more traffic, the search engine will get confused because your keyword does not have any relevance to your content at all. When this happens, the search engine can ignore you, penalize you or blacklist your website from its search index.

If you take the time to read newsletters or articles about keywords today, you will mostly find similar emphasis on keyword relevance. When you write an article seeded with keywords that are relevant to your product or idea, you are doing several things at once. Your first accomplishment is in having a greater chance of higher search engine result rankings. Because the search engine understands what your website is all about, it would not hesitate to churn it out as a search result from a user query relevant to your keywords.

Second, by having relevant keywords on your site, you get more chances of attracting the right kind of traffic. Having more relevant website hits gives you more chances of selling your product because your product is exactly the reason why the users are directed to your site.  Because of the relevance of your article, your ratio of relevant to irrelevant surfer traffic increases.

Third, as a result of highly relevant keywords and content, the users will find your website very useful and will most likely decide to mark your site down for another visit just to find out if they can get something useful out of it again.

Lastly, even though you will experience a significantly reduced traffic count, you don’t really lose anything since most searchers tend to get annoyed when they are re-directed to a website that doesn’t contain anything related to their search. You increase and enhance the usefulness and reputation of your site without having to resort to dirty, misleading tactics for traffic generation.