One of the big buzzwords in the SEO industry is “keyword analysis.” You hear it a LOT, and it means different things to different people. In general, keyword analysis is the ratio of a particular keyword to the total word count of an article, expressed in a percentage.
For example, if you had 100 words in an article and 10 of those words were your keyword, then your keyword analysis would show you have a 10% keyword density. Seems simple enough, right?
Search engines index your page, discard meaningless words (like “to” and “the”), and rank words based upon their mentions. Let’s use a short sentence as an example: “The cat in the hat is fat in his hat.” An index of this sentence would look like this:
hat = 2
cat = 1
fat = 1
his = 1
Notice that the words like “in” and “the” were not used in this simple index. The most important word in this sentence would be “hat” as far as search engines are concerned.
This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but it makes the point of keyword density and why keyword analysis is important. We have seen many sites that had keywords which were completely irrelevant to what a customer may be using to search for the site. These websites were likely way down the list of possible pages a search engine might display.
Keyword analysis is an important part of the SEO process. Make sure you know what keywords your customers are using to find you and make these words the most dense on your page.
Try to keep the percentage under 5% as more than this could trigger reduced ranking in search engines because people used to “load” a page with extra words that were not visible just to improve the ranking.
Make sure the content on your page is readable. Don’t sacrifice readability for an extra percentage. Finally, use titles and headings to signal to search engines which words are important. This also helps readers decide what is important and will improve the overall readability of the page.
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