Going insane from figuring out true keyword density..

[blue_soda025]

I've been trying to figure out the true keyword density of a post on my site and I've gotten wildly varying results depending on the KW density checker. The problem is, the keyword contains 5 words so it's very long, which probably explains the wildly varying results. I have a WP plugin that checks it for me and it says 8%, which seemed quite high especially since I don't feel like I used it that many times in the article.

I then tried checking it with another KW density checker that I downloaded called DupeFree Pro and it says 1.3%!! I have no idea which one to believe! Of course, they probably use different methods of calculating the density, but what I really want to know is, what is the "proper" way of calculating it? I know that KW density doesn't matter all too much but the fact that I get results ranging from 1% to 8% just bugs me because I'm not sure if it's too low or too high now.

[Ralf Skirr]

That's why you shouldn't look at % at all. :-)

Seriously, it's not necessary to calculate. Use common sense. Look at your article. How often does the kw phrase show up? Short article but many, many kws? Long article, but you can hardly find the kw? Needs changing.

With a 5 word kwp I would use it only sparingly. A 5 word phrase showing up 8 times or so in an article would probably very unnatural. Better use it sparingly, but strategically in important parts of the article, especially the title. Then make sure to have related kws in the article as well.

Ralf

[yoyoedward]

you must limit your keyword density to 3-6 % to avoid penalization

[blue_soda025]

Hm, I think I used the keyword about 5 times and the article is 662 words. That seems about right, I would think. About once or twice per paragraph at most.

I certainly do write unique articles for all of my websites, but I was just a bit alarmed at the high % that the checker gave me. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had the keyword in all of my titles/headings. I am guessing that you should include the appearance of the keywords in the headings as well when taking into account the keyword density, correct?

Overall, the article looks fine to me in terms of how much I used the keyword, but I guess I am just concerned about the possibility of being penalized by SEs because of the high % that some checkers returned.

[Lares]

Check out what keyword density your competition on page 1 has and use same as them. I see in some niches 1-2% keyword density and in others even 15% (like 5-6 words long product name).

[UMS]

There are two main ways of calculating keyword density and the formula used varies between tools.

Let's take an example:

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article
B=Total number of words in the article
C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:
(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:
(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

[bermuda]

If you have been constantly reading the points published by experienced SEO people and webmasters who have been steadily working on their real world web marketing as well as optimization tasks, so you can guess that keyword density is not a serious issue these days, especially when talking about how Google ranks web pages, because even if the terms are present on your page for one time, that would be enough.

The bigger jobs are done using incoming links because even if you add tens of keyterms to your pages and raise the density to high numbers but your pages lack enough links coming from quality sources, your ranks may not change a bit in the course of time. Off page matters, primarily links, are today determining the real values of websites and so, keep adding quality contents to your site naturally.