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I have read many posts here to keep the density under 20% so that is why I ask this question. My gut says to give it a try, but I just thought I would see what you all thought before I started tweaking.
Burke
Then do the same. It's a very good idea to compare yourself against the highest ranking pages and adjust accordingly. Of course that may not be the whole story as to why they rank higher than you.
> do you think it will improve my ranking
You are on the 'second' page of search results now. The number of people finding you will be much less than if you were ranked on the 'first' page. So, why not give it a try, you've got little to lose.
Stick around, you'll find lots of other issues which will affect your ranking. Of course, keyword density is still important.
> My gut says to give it a try.
Go on, be a devil...
Related [webmasterworld.com]
"I decided the best keyword density is using the keyword as many times in the text as I can while making it still sound good to my visitors."
That's not bad advice.
Kw density in Google is not a factor in how they score pages.
If KW density was a factor none of the top results would rank because they have a KW density of zero.
One of the many tests I have run...
Page was No.3 of 100,000, for several months, with KWD of 2%.
Asked the webmaster to up it to 12%, still No.3 for 2 months.
Asked the webmaster to put it up to 22%, and for the last 3 weeks it is not in the first 1000.
Allowing for the variations due to constant research and testing of the algo, an interesting result?
I am with pmac on this!
Found that one in the first 10 has "exit" 153 times in its page.
Hardly zero%!
My KWD prog won't work on it's URL.
I cannot get back to G, am locked in the page.
Interesting?
High density, Low density take your pick. What weird results anyway.
"I decided the best keyword density is using the keyword as many times in the text as I can while making it still sound good to my visitors."
I could not agree more. It is not anywhere close to as big of a factor as it was years ago.
Generally, I work to fill the page as much as possible as above, maximizing pharases in particular to match title/desc. etc. and then forget about it.
Doing this, sometimes the end result is fairly high density on a single key if it is a product name for instance. Personally, I DO NOT see any evidence that Google penalizes for high density, at least not on a "real" page of copy with 500+ total words... For something short, more along the lines of a doorway, they very well may for all I know, however...
Bottom line, I see wild density differences among top serps all the time. Position one might be 3.5%, with 2 at 7.2% and three at 2.4%. Again, not the pivitol factor today, IMO.
Wow! 24% KWD? So is 1 in 4 words on your page a keyword?
Coco, the percentage is so high because that specific keyword density analyser eliminates stop words. Without that the keyword density should be below 9%.
Stop word lists are language specific. So using an English Keyword Density Analyser (with elimination of stop words like "is", "are" "the" "and" etc.) would be of no use for a text in another language.
This just isn't factual.
>sliding scale based on page size<
two months ago a site took the 1st position on a "to die for" single keyword. It was nothing more than an auto generated page repeating the KW in different size fonts with a couple of outbound links with the KW in the anchor text. I would guess that the kw density ran over 70%.
A couple of days later the page was replaced with a more "traditional" page that probably has a KW density of about, oh, I dunno, 6-9%. The site hasn't budged.
Links links links.
Yes, it is. I've consistently found that when dealing with search terms that are not particularly competitive, the combination of solid PR of the page + high KWD is generally sufficient. How can you say it isn't a "major factor" if this fairly consistently works for me? NO, high KWD won't get you very far with highly competitive search terms. For those you likely will need links from other sites with the search term in the anchor text. However, most search terms people are using aren't highly competitive.
>two months ago a site took the 1st position on a "to die for" single keyword. It was nothing more than an auto generated page repeating the KW in different size fonts with a couple of outbound links with the KW in the anchor text. I would guess that the kw density ran over 70%.
>A couple of days later the page was replaced with a more "traditional" page that probably has a KW density of about, oh, I dunno, 6-9%. The site hasn't budged.
>Links links links.
If this is a "to die for" single keyword, by definition it is highly competitive. This is a special case scenario. People search far more often for terms that aren't "to die for" single keywords.
It wouldn't be sufficient in the least if competing pages had even the least bit of anchor text in the links.
>This is a special case scenario.<
True, maybe not the best example. Is exit a competive keyword?
Not true. High KWD can beat sites if all they have is the least bit of anchor text in the links. However, it won't work if they have lots of such links.
>True, maybe not the best example. Is exit a competive keyword?
The answer is that is this is not the best example. Note I wrote "IN MOST CASES KWD is a major factor with Google." (Emphasis added) By that I was acknowledging that there were exceptions. In fact, for that statement by me to be true, it merely needs to be so in <50% of the real world cases.
The pages above me have a much lower density for this term than I do
Regardless of whether keyword density is a factor in Google's ranking or not I still manage it carefully because it is a factor with other engines. With Google I've found that the following ranking considerations are most important to positioning:
AllinTitle:search term
AllinText:search term
AllinAnchor:search term
AllinUrl:search term
It's my opinion that keyword density and prominence in all these areas are important to ranking. Move your keyword closer to the beginning of your <title>. Pepper it all the way through your <body> area and close the page with it. Remember your headings. Google loves pages with keywords in the <h1> and <h2> tags. Use your target search term near the beginning of the heading tags.
The page may have changed since gaining high ranking was attained and not yet been reindexed.
If someone else manages to snaffle the same incoming links with all in anchor the same and also has a higher kwd I'm betting they will outrank.
To make this statement only has value if you can show pages that are equal in every respect except kwd, and that even then,kwd does not make the site rank higher
I have, however seen MANY instances where this is not true. We have a PR5 site, about 3 paragraphs of text containing the search phrase 13 times and this site cant rank worth a darn for our targeted phrase! The first page results are low ranking sites with NO KEYWORDS except in title bar. The term is also not a popular term and should otherwise be a "cake walk" to rank!
So there - I went to both sides of the spectrum! Bottom line is WHO KNOWS!
Best to all...
Here are some facts. Keywords/phrase DO play an important role in getting good rankings. That is what humans use to search. What that optimal density is? The best advise (IMO) was given a while back. Include your keywords/phrase as many times as possible on your pages BUT make sure is easy to read for humans. Have human readable keywords/phrases in your Title and Description.
Dave
There are top scoring pages with not a single occurence of the key phrase. To me, that ends the KW (requirement)discussion.
That's anchor text not keyword density. I still scratch my head after reading the posts from people who insist that one factor will get position in the SERPs. I've said it before and I'll say it again...It's a combination of factors. Actually it's a combination of around 100 factors. Google just won't say what they are.
If KW density was mission critical a page with zero density could not score well.
PageRank alone has over 500,000,000 variables - and that is only one component of the algo.
KW density is another component, but is not one of the more important ones.
