Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase that describes the main concept of a theme. A keyword is a word you type in when you are searching for information on the internet or on a website such as Action Network. For example, if you are looking for information about baby’s name, “baby’s name” would be the keywords that you use in the search box.
Keyword density
It denotes the number of times that a particular keyword phrase is used on a webpage. It is the ratio of keyword frequency to total number of content words used in the body text of a web page. The formula is the total number of keywords used divided by the total number of words on a page. It is always in the figure of percentage.
For example if a particular keyword “internet marketing” is used 5 times in a body text of 100 content words then we can say here the keyword density is 5/100 * 100 . That is 5%.
It is a vital issue for search engine ranking. Search engines today are measuring keyword density as a factor in assigning relevancy ratings or ranks to web pages. The more often the keyword or phrase appears in a webpage, the higher its search engine ranking. Because a keyword is recognized as a main topic of a page. But at the same time if it is repeated too often the page may be penalized for keyword stuffing. It is good to have a density in between 3 to 5% to get a high page rank. On the other hand, if the keyword density is too low, the page will not be highly rated by search engines.
Keyword density can vary for different search engines. Because different stemming techniques or different stop words usage by different search engines for indexing a webpage.It is one of the On Page Optimization technique used for site optimization.