I was challenged about the veracity of a statement I made recently in our office concerning the role of keyword density in modern SEO practice. I am posting this to provide couple of reference articles to support my position that Keyword Density is a load of rubbish!

SEOmoz is considered, by most in the industry, to be a source for accurate and current SEO knowledge. In a 2007 article one of their senior writers wrote:

“Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth in this guide, I’ll simply reference Dr. Edel Garcia’s seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.”

The article by Dr. Garcia which he references was actually written back in 2005, which is when I first encountered it. Here is a post by the Search Engine Roundtable which gives their support and also links to the actual article.

More recently Will Reynolds, a leading SEO expert in Philadelphia, and a speaker at numerous industry conferences, listed Keyword Density as one of the myths about SEO he debunks. (view his lecture videos)

I have encountered many clients who’s knowledge of SEO is based in the past, or who have been convinced by an SEO “experts” or companies that keyword density is as crucial to SEO as the meta-keyword tag. There are numerous SEO myths like these out there. The simple advice which I give my clients, and which is echoed by Google themselves, is to simply write naturally, including as many related keywords and phrases as you can, while keeping it readable and sensible for human visitors. Common sense before mathematical formulas!

It’s funny how you will still see posts in webmaster forums by people obsessed with the mathematical density of each word on their website and trying to “guess” how Goggle’s algorithm will treat each word. If they spent half that time on other tasks, they would probably rank higher with far less effort.

It’s kind of like “weapons of mass destruction”… you have to keep the myth going because an entire industry has been built around it! Just Google “keyword density” and see all the tools and scripts being sold to help you calculate the perfect content-to-keyword ratio to Rank #1. Ya, right…

Until next time… Cheers!