SEO Elements - Keyword Density & Prominence

What Is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is one of the corner posts of SEO. Reviewing and improving keyword densities and prominence is one of the most important activities the optimiser will do and yet is often neglected in favour of other tasks such as link building.

It could be defined as being the number of times a single word or phrase e.g. "computer" or "IT support and computer repair" is repeated within a piece of text. That text could be a page on a website or a website as a whole. It could even relate to a single sentence like a page title or page description. If you count the number of words in this paragraph and count the number of times the phrase "computer repair" appears you can calculate a keyword density of 2.2%.

From the point of view of SEO the objective is to ensure the densities are at a level that yields best results in SERPs. How to choose appropriate keywords is outside the scope of this description but you can follow the link to read about a small part of keyword selection.

What Is Prominence?

Prominence is similar to density but it measures how important the key word is likely to be depending on where it is positioned in a page for example. In other words, phrases near the top of a page are considered more important than those at the bottom of the page.

SEO should be focused towards ensuring the most important phrases for a website have the highest prominence.

How Can I Check Keyword Density and Prominence?

One way would be to count the total number of words in a page, title or even for a whole website. Then count the number of times a word appears. Divide the second number by the first and multiply by 100 and you will have the density for that word.

Of course that is time consuming and many nice people offer free tools to calculate these values for a web page and all the elements within it. Once of the very best tools like this is the Ranks NL Keyword Density Analyser.

The Most Common Mistake

I see a lot of websites where the designer has included a huge list of key words on a home page in an attempt to bring improved rankings for those words. Some people refer to this technique as “keyword stuffing”.

Another similar mistake is to sacrifice readability by repeating certain words too often. This may put the reader off and can even result in densities that are so high that they end up having a detrimental effect on SERPs positions.