Lower keyword density seems better.

[member22]

Everyone seems to agree on the fact that to rank well on search engines a webpage needs to have a keyword density between 2 and 4 %. However from what I recently noticed most websites that rank very well ( TOP 3 of google ) on competitive keyword have a keyword density ( the one they are going for ) that is usually between 0.7 and 1.5 % ?

Has anyone noticed a change in the way google treats google density ?

[tedster]

Most SEOs with a lot of years experience now agree that keyword density is not directly measured any more.

See [webmasterworld.com...]

That thread (and many other useful discussions as well) is paart of the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

[member22]

Thanks for the link but I don't entirely agree because I have noticed that I rank pretty bad for a keyword that I have on most pages of my website whereas I rank very well for a a keyword that is in the same semantic area but that your barely find in my website...

which would still mean google looks at the density of your keywords don't you think ?

[tedster]

The algorithms are all much more sophisticated than just calculating a basic keyword density number. KWD still can be a basic tool for the webmaster to use for analysis, but that doesn't mean it such a calculation is used directly in the actual algorithm.

You still can't stuff a keyword and rank, and it's still rather rare to rank when a keyword isn't there at all. But various kinds of semantic analysis today extract a lot of information - indexing character strings was very 1990s in information retreival [IR].

[member22]

It seems that google is getting more intelligent and is able to relate my main keywords to other words and that is what I need to work on, the overall semantic.

[pavlovapete]

You may enjoy Marcia's classic post

Phrase Based Multiple Indexing and Keyword Co-Occurrence
[webmasterworld.com...]