Performing a healthy SEO strategy requires many aspects to keep in mind and one of the fundamental ones is maintaining a proper keyword density. Balancing a proper keyword density can either make or break your website’s ranking growth. While it can be a key factor in increasing the page visibility and attracting your target audience, it can also impact your rankings and even lead a page to penalty if not used correctly. Before we jump into the strategies for maintaining a proper keyword density let’s have a clear idea of what it is and how it can be calculated.
What is keyword density?
The term keyword density refers to an element of keyword optimization that denotes the number and occurrence of the same target keyword on a webpage. Being one of the key signals of the search engine rankings, the percentage of the frequency of a target keyword denotes the keyword density of a particular page and determines the relevancy of the content. While using this aspect requires following some steps, it can be quite easily be ignored during the content creation process. To calculate the keyword density of a page you simply need to divide the total number of the target keywords that appeared by the total word count.
How is Keyword Density Calculated?
Keyword density = the number of times the targeted keyword occurs on a page / the overall number of words on the page
While the search engines restrain from publicizing the ideal density of keywords for better ranking, putting a keyword 1-2 times per 100 words is believed to be the best practice by most SEO professionals.
How To Maintain Keyword Density in Content?
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Introduce semantic keywords
Semantic keywords are basically the alternatives, synonyms or words that are contextually related to the target keyword. Semantic keywords are related to a certain keyword based on their meaning or conceptually. Like for the keyword digital marketing, you can use online marketing, keyword research, SEO or paid search. Using such words related to a particular target keyword will improve the quality and relevancy of your content along with strengthening the on-page SEO strategy.
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Add variations with keyword stemming
Quite a similar approach like using semantic keywords, through keyword stemming SEOs add a prefix, suffix to a certain or use pluralisation to add variety to the content. As search engines are capable of identifying and understanding similar words of a keyword, applying this strategy helps in avoiding keyword stuffing.
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Practice writing for the readers
It is a common practice of focusing solely on search engines while creating content. We often tend to ignore the fact that a piece of content is made for users in the first place. It is important to maintain a healthy keyword and also important to make the occurrences of the words natural in the content.
When taking certain decisions about keyword targeting, and especially density, it’s critical to leverage factual information rather than assumptions, as it is with nearly everything else in SEO. This is why it is crucial to A/B test your website copy to be extra assured.