keyword density

For many years, “keyword density” was the holy grail of SEO content. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of theories on what the optimal keyword density is, from formulas produced to strict guidelines on how writers should be using it in SEO content daily. No one knows better than me. I came from the old Google days (pre-2012) when online writers were sometimes treated as the minions of SEO black hats. It was rough: we had to stuff in those keywords like nobody’s business, no matter how much they read awkwardly. According to many industry experts, however, keyword density has now completely died today. Is that true? Let’s chat about it. What Really is Keyword Density? Keyword density is the measurement that indicates how many times a keyword appears in a piece of content (i.e. blog, web page) versus the total number of words in the piece. Keywords were counted within content, headings, meta descriptions, image names and alt tags to provide what many experts believed for many years was a better user experience. Keyword density was calculated by the number of times a specific keyword was included in content, divided by the total number of words in an analyzed text, x one hundred. For example: 10 keywords in 500 words = 2% keyword density. Here’s an official chart showing the formula: This formula, while it may seem meaningless today, was very popular in and around 2011 and was widely believed to be the “right” way to do SEO content. As I mentioned earlier, I remember the days of stuffing my SEO content with keywords and counting said density, and it was rough. Marketers in 2011 thought creating 50 articles on this exact keyword “payday loan Atlanta Georgia” was a good idea, and those keywords stuffed in made the content like the most overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey you ever saw. Now as you and any good content marketer knows, today’s content is more about people than keywords.  And that’s the real reason we don’t count our keywords any more. Let’s explore further why keyword density is officially dead. The Keyword Density Booby Trap According to Moz, companies that focus too much on attaining a certain keyword density often run the risk of ruining content, slaughtering credibility, annoying readers, and earning themselves all too many “back” clicks. Strong words, right? Unfortunately, Moz is right. It stands to reason that keyword density may be one of the great SEO myths of our day. While keyword density is meant to create a more readable document, more often than not it simply destroys the legibility and readability of content, creating low conversion rates and poor user experience. Why, then, have we been taught that keyword density is the end-all-be-all of SEO and high-quality content? For one, many people were taught to believe that keyword density is how search engines determine the relevance of a given page. This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Moz, if search engines focused solely on keyword density to rank pages, all content creators would need to do is repeat the keyword phrase of choice over and over again in order to rank well in Google. And, trust us, Google is not that stupid. In fact, it’s likely that Google evolved beyond that in the late 90’s. That said, it’s unwise to use density as a reliable metric in today’s search climate. Most reputable keyword tools have already kicked it to the curb. In order to rank pages, Google does take keywords into account but the actual density doesn’t matter nearly as much as we’ve always believed it does. The Pitfalls of Keyword Density When you really think about it, keyword density is a fluid term. To have a certain number of keywords in a piece of content is one thing, but to attain the correct relative position and dispersion of keywords throughout the document is entirely another. The traditional measure of keyword density fails to take into account things like how many documents are relevant for a given keyword or how the piece of content targeting the keyword uses things like internal linking, webpage structure, user experience (including how long users interact with a page and what the page’s bounce rate is), domain age, and back links. Yes: Keyword Density is Now Confirmed as a Useless Metric Because of this, keyword density is essentially a useless metric which many industry leaders believe is a complete waste of time. According to Moz, “people who chase some mystical on-page keyword density are probably doing more harm than good.” The Rise of Semantic Search In 2013, Google released the Hummingbird update. This update allowed Google to process search results based on semantic search, which evaluates results based on their ability to match user intent, rather than ranking them by keyword density and other Boolean measurements. As soon as Hummingbird came out, marketers began to re-evaluate their relationships with keyword density. Specifically, many marketers began wondering if keyword density mattered as much as they had always thought it did. Overwhelmingly, the answer was “no.” Before semantic search, Google used metrics like keywords and linking architecture to determine which pages were the best match to a reader’s intent and query. Once the search engine had evaluated these things, it returned rank-ordered results that were based largely upon how well the page’s keywords matched to the number of links within the site as a whole. More keywords, more positive evaluation, generally. This led to the rise of keyword density and to many marketers beginning to see keyword density as one of the best ways to rank well in Google. This, in turn, led not only to a craze with keyword density but also to black-hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and predatory linking strategies. Semantic Search De-Values the Keyword “Overstuffing” Density Fortunately, the introduction of Hummingbird altered the playing field in a big way. One of the main things Hummingbird did was use semantic search principals to make keyword stuffing and misleading linking strategies too difficult and expensive to pursue. Because Hummingbird evaluates content based on its … Read more