SEO Copywriting: SEO Tools & Tips Every Web Writer Should Know About (Part III)

This is Part III of what I’ve dubbed SEO Tools Week here at SeoWritingJobs.com. In Part I, we discussed Google’s Adword Keyword Tool. In Part II, we discussed its close cousin, the Search-based keyword tool. Today, we’re going to talk about keyword density. To start, let’d define it.

Keyword Density: What It Is, Writing Tips & How to Calculate It

What Is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is simply a measure of how frequently keywords and keyword phrases appear in web copy.

Right off the bat, you should know that search engine marketing experts disagree about what is the proper keyword density. Some it should be between 2 and 5% density; others say between 5 and 7%. Some others say up to 9% is okay and then there are others who tout that 15 to 25% is fine.

So how do you discern the correct answer? In truth, only the programmers who write search engine algorithms know. But one thing all search engine marketers agree on is that you should not “keyword stuff” your copy. Not only is it bad writing, it can get a site blacklisted by search engines.

Following are some guidelines that I follow as an SEO copywriter. Just in case you read something to the contrary, the following is from my personal point of view.

Keyword Density Guidelines

Note: The following assumes that you’re writing a 400-word article, which is about the average length of most web articles.

Primary Keyword Phrase: Don’t repeat your main keyword phrase more once every 100 words. Try to use them in the first paragraph, a few subheadings and in the final paragraph.

Secondary Keyword Phrases: Where possible, use secondary keyword phrases to round out your copy to get extra recognition from search engines. If you get in the habit of using Google’s Keyword AdWords Tool — which we discussed in Part I of this series – you will have lots of them at your fingertips from which to choose.

Keyword Density Writing Tip: If I have a particularly sticky keyword phrase to write on, I use a lot of subtitles in the article. Why? Because this gives me a way to get the keyword phrase in to achieve optimum keyword density.

How to Manually Calculate Keyword Density

There are many tools on the market for calculating keyword density. But to do it manually, follow these simple steps:

1. Assuming you use Microsoft Word, get the word count of your article.

2. Go to the MS Word toolbar and click “Edit”, then “Find.” In the box that appears, type in your keyword/keyword phrase(s). It will tell you how many times it appears in your text. Write this number down.

3. Open your calculator and type in the number of times the keyword is used (number in Step 2) and divide it by your article word count (number in Step 1). Multiply this number by 100 and this is your keyword density.

So if you wrote a 400-word article and used a primary keyword phrase four times and two secondary keyword phrases twice each, this would give your article a 2% keyword density overall (1% for the main phrase and .05% each for the two secondary phrases).

Following is the math.

4 uses of keyword phrase / 400 words in article = .01 x 100 = 1%
2 uses of one secondary keyword phrase / 400 words in article = .005 x 100 = .5%
2 uses of another secondary keyword phrase / 400 words in article = .005 x 100 = .5%

Stop Words: Why They Are Important to Calculating Keyword Density

When reading about how to calculate keyword density, it can be very confusing. This is because many don’t fully understand how the numbers shake out. To explain, some keyword density calculators take stop words into account (ie, prepositions – the, by, and, to, of, etc.); others don’t. In a 400-word article, you may have 20 or 30 stop words or more.

That’s why it’s important to know exactly what you’re calculating. In my opinion, this is why so many disagree about keyword density.

SEO Tool: Keyword Density Calculator

When I first started writing SEO copy, here’s a keyword density calculator I relied on to get the right density for clients: http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/density.asp#analyse.