Body text & keyword density

Keyword density is the ratio of the number of keywords present in your website to the total number of words in your website expressed in percentage. For example, if your keyword is mentioned in the text 8 times, and the total number of words is 100, then the keyword density is 8 per cent.

The keyword density usually determines the search engine listing of your website. Higher keyword density might bring you higher positions in the search results for those particular keywords. Hence keyword density is an important factor in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

The keyword is the word or phrase which most refers to your product; which is the word a customer will use when he searches for your product. For example, if your product is “Xerox Photocopier”, then the keywords will be “Xerox” as well as “photocopier”. When someone searches for either of these terms, or both, your website should come in the listing.

The position your website will appear at depends on the keyword density.

Different search engines might have different methods of looking for keywords. The search engines may use different stop words and stemming techniques. This means some may count one word while others may not. Also, it is possible that some may search the body (text) only while others search other tags such as ALT tags, META tags, comment tags, and so on. Hence it is not necessary that all will show the same keyword density.

A high percentage of keywords with respect to total words would indicate that that is the main theme of your web page, which in turn helps you achieve a higher position in search engine listing. This does not mean you should have too many number of keywords.

Many search engines penalize websites for filling the website text with keywords. A website can also be penalized if they use hidden keywords which do not show up in the body text, but are hidden using colours etc in different tags.

The way a search engine penalizes varies. In some cases, only some of the web pages or some of the web page contents of the website could be nullified, devalued, filtered, or de indexed. In other cases, the whole website could be taken out of the search engine listing altogether. This could hurt the website’s business very badly since any one searching for the product is not going to see the website listed.

To have a high listing an optimum keyword density is required. Search engine optimization techniques usually help you find the required keyword density that could help your website.