Keyword density is a way of determining how relevant a website is to a specific keyword or key phrase. It is a good indication of how frequently the chosen keyword appears on the page. While it is smart to use your keywords regularly, you want to be careful not to use them too much. Try to make the text flow like normal speech. If your keywords come up every other word, then your website will probably be marked as spam and possibly penalized.
Keyword density is figured out by calculating the percentage of keywords in contrast to the other words on a web page.
You can figure out your keyword density pretty easily by dividing the total number of keywords by the total number of words on the page. If you have a page with 100 words on it, and you use your main keyword 5 times, then the keyword density of that web page would be:
(Keywords) / (Total words) = Keyword Density
(5) / (100) = 0.05
Since this is a percentage, the keyword density for this web page would be 5%.
No one is sure of the exact range that you want your site to fall in, but many will agree that it's somewhere between 3% and 8%. If you start getting a lot higher than that, you run the risk of being penalized, so make sure you don't go overboard.
This rule applies to every page of your site, and to every keyword. Vary your keywords from page to page, and select ones that are most relevant to that specific page. Just be sure to keep your keyword density between 3% and 8% on all of these pages.
Easy ways to check your keyword density:
Copy all of your text from a single page of your website into a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer.
In the 'Edit' menu, click on 'Select All'. Next, go to the 'Tools' menu and click on 'Word Count'. Write down the total number of words on a piece of paper.
Now go back to the 'Edit' menu, and click on 'Find'. In the 'Replace' tab, enter in the keyword you want to find. 'Replace' that keyword with itself, so no text will really change.
When the replace function finishes, it will tell you how many words were replaced, which is how many times your keyword shows up on that page.
Now you know the total number of words for that page, in addition to the number of keywords for that page, so you can use those numbers to determine your keyword density.
