google and keyword density

[soapystar]

i see the often used tool for keyword density on this ofrum uses the meta tags and title as well as ignoring 3 letter words or less. is this relevant to google? or would google ignore meta tags and include all words do you think?

[heini]

The tool is configurable, with or w/o meta tags.
Google reads netas, title and desc. are important, keywords less. I think they go into general word count, but opinions differ here.
Three letter words... If you'd do a page on "day and night" I would think that you'd want to count three letter words and expect Google to do the same.

[Marcia]

I check all the different ways, you don't want the density for the "chosen" phrases to go too high with any of the counts. And sometimes the wrong phrase will show up disproportionately high and needs to be cut back.

[digitalghost]

Don't forget to consider proximity in your keyword checks. Just as important as density, moreso if the density isn't handled correctly.

[yankee]

I'm not sure why the default is to ignore three letter words. They should be included. One and two letter words can be ignored.

[soccer_star]

What is the recommended keyword density on a page and how much is considered spamming?

[Marcia]

soccer_star, some will say 5-8%, different people have different views. It can depend on how long the page is, too.

Going along with what DG suggested, it's word order and proximity also. How many times the words are used together in a phrase, what order they're used in, how close to each other, and how they're distributed throughout the page.

I've seen one person's page get slammed down 40 places in the SERPs using excessive repetition - density 30%+ - and yet seen other pages do fine with that much.

Generally when someone finds what they think is the sweet spot for density they're not gonna tell *anyone*, and it might not even apply to other sites. I've got what seems to be working on several of mine - yet it might not work for someone else because everyone puts pages together differently.

Also, there are other factors that come into play - inbound and outbound link text, and contextual relevancy for the linked-from an linked-to pages.

It takes a little while to work with a given site or page for density, and checking the ratio of density between phrases on the same page. If something needs tweaking up or down, it's a gradual process, making the adjustment and seeing the effect.

I just watched one page drop down 3 spots, directly attributable to the loss of only one occurrence of inbound link text - and changes to the page's density downward made without telling. It's a matter of keeping track, and with the *Fresh* spidering, seeing what effect another density change will make without any difference in links or PR being factored in.

[annej]

I have a quick reverence to my articles on my one of my homepages. My concern is that the list of articles repeats a word several times and it wouldn't make sense if I left it off.

It's like

green widgets
red widgets
purple widgets
etc.

I'm wondering if Googlebot would read this as spam.

Anne