Is Keyword Density Still Relevant?

[TaylorRHawkins]

Good afternoon everyone!

I wanted to ask everyone here a question, one that has been being discussed around my office with a lot of different sides being taken.

Does Keyword Density matter? If it does, what percentage do you try to have your keyword hit?

[Tenlo]

No, you should not be stuffing KW or worried about density, make your content user friendly and useful based on the KW phrases that you want to attract visitors with.

[TaylorRHawkins]

I agree with what you have to say about KW stuffing and making sure that the content on our sites are useful, well-written and purposeful. But should we avoid focusing on keyword density entirely? Even if it's just hitting a 3%-5% margin?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Based on my experience "The Keyword Density" does not have a big impact on the rank performance of a web page.

Don't get me wrong you need your Keyword in Title Tag, Header 1 etc. But there other factors with a better impact and more weight than "Keyword Density"

1. Domain Age
2. Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain
3. Keyword As First Word in Domain
4. Domain registration length
5. Keyword in Subdomain Name
6. Domain History
7. Exact Match Domain
8. Public vs. Private WhoIs
9. Penalized WhoIs Owner
10. Country TLD extension

[Roman-Delcarmen]

this a great list to keep in mind

http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

[nhhernandez]

I was actually also looking for an answer to this and found threads way back 2013 with the same advice that keyword density doesn't matter. What I found using MozPro is that target keywords should be mentioned in the meta title, description, H1, URL (if possible), and at least once in the copy without breaking the keywords apart. I also found that mentioning a target keyword in a 500-word copy more than 15 times is flagged by Moz as stuffing. I just use these as a rough guide. When I'm feeling particularly worried that some keywords have been mentioned too much, I use a free keyword density analyser to see how many times they appeared and reduce if necessary (especially if the copy doesn't read too well because of too much repetitiveness). Hope this helps!

[TaylorRHawkins]

This is excellent, thank you! I had no idea that mentioning a keyword 15 times in a 500-word copy is something that gets flagged by Moz.