What’s The Right Keyword Density?

What’s the Right Keyword Density?

Keyword density is hard to quantify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page, versus the number of words on a page-a ratio, in other words. So if you have a single web page that has 1,000 words of text and your keyword appears on that page 10 times (assum- ing a single keyword, not a keyword phrase), then your keyword density is 1 percent.

What’s the right keyword density? That’s a question that no one has been able to answer definitively. Some experts say

that your keyword density should be around five to seven percent, and others sug- gest that it should be a higher or lower percentage. But no one seems to agree on exactly where it should be.

Because there’s no hard and fast rule, or even a good rule of thumb, to dictate keyword density, site owners are flying on their own. What is certain is that using a keyword or set of keywords or phrases too often begins to look like keyword stuffing to a search engine, and that can negatively impact the ranking of your site.

See, there you are. Not enough keyword density and your site ranking suffers. Too much keyword density and your site ranking suffers. But you can at least find out what keyword density your com- petition is using by looking at the source code for their pages.

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Looking at your competition’s source code is also a good way to find out which key- words they’re using. The listed keywords should appear in the first few lines of code (indicated in Figures 4-3 and 4-5).

To view the source code of a page if you’re using Internet Explorer, follow these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to the page for which you would like to view the source code.

2. Click View in the standard toolbar. (In Internet Explorer 7.0, select Page.) The View (or Page) menu appears, as shown in Figure 4-2.

3. Select View Source and a separate window opens to display the source code from the web page you’re viewing, as shown in Figure 4-3.

If you’re using the Firefox browser, the menus are slightly different, and the source code looks a little different. These are the steps for Firefox:

1. Open Firefox and navigate to the page for which you would like to view the source code.

2. Click View in the standard toolbar. The View menu appears, as shown in Figure 4-4.

3. Select Page Source to open a separate window that displays the source code for the web page, as shown in Figure 4-5. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard combination Ctrl + U to open the source code window.

You may notice that the source code looks a little different in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox. The differences are noticeable, but the basic information is all there. That said, it’s not easy to get through this information. All the text of the page is jumbled in with the page encod- ing. It may take some time to decipher, but ultimately, this is the best way to find out not only what keywords the competition is using, but also how they’re using them, and how often the keywords appear on their pages.