What are your thoughts on keyword density?

[underscorelive]

Useless metric?

Good as an indicator, but not of any real value?

Best way to judge how well content is optimised?

I've heard all kinds of opinions, what's yours?

Thanks!

[emerchantpay]

Id give you just one advice about **keyword density **use it as much as you want, until you can have 5 random people read it and still consider the text to sound great. If by any means any of them feels its too much then you have to reconsider your keyword density.

[Mike.Goracke]

Keyword density can help Google identify what your page is about.

There is not a certain % of keyword density that will give you good or bad results - the thing to keep in mind while you are writing is your visitors. You want to mention your keyword where applicable in your content; however, you do not want it to seem forced.

Best way to judge how well content is optimized? - I like using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool.

David Naylor has a pretty cool keyword density tool which returns some good info.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[EGOL]

I never even think about KW density.  I just write in natural language.  Sometimes that produces a lot of keyword instances in my writing, sometimes it doesn't.

I think that it is hard enough to write great content without having the additional burden of stuffing or subtracting some special words into the content. What a PITA.

Google doesn't want people doing that.  Save yourself some time and just write like a human.  That's what I do and my stuff ranks fine.

[KevinBudzynski]

In my opinion, as long as the page title, headings and some of the content have your kw in it, you should be fine. The content should be natural, but because it focuses on a specific good/service those terms will naturally flow out a bit more.

Google understands "natural" much more than people think. If something is "unnatural" it might consider it giving the person who queried that keyword a bad user experience and that is what Google doesn't want to do. If the searcher always has a good user experience, they will come back (and that is one of the objectives of Google Algorithm).

[underscorelive]

All absolutely valid responses - we currently just write copy for our users and optimise HTML for the search engines, seems to be working well thus far

Thanks guys!