Keywords are the lifeline for search engine optimization of any website. Keywords are nothing but words a probable visitor might use to search the product or service or whatever he requires in the internet.
Search engines look for keywords even in the domain names of the websites now. Many think that every word in a phrase can be a keyword, but that’s not true. Search engines discard words like a, and, at and the list goes on, as these words don’t make any sense or some are considered harmful for search engine results. These words are called as Poison Words or Stop Words, so when choosing your keywords take care not to include the stop words.
Now we know how to choose the right keywords, but how to know the Keyword Density that is appropriate for the search engines. Some search engines like yahoo, msn require more keyword density. But most of the SEO engineers are concentrating on google’s keyword density. Till now from the experience and knowledge had about keyword density it is found that 2% to 6% of keywords in web pages had bettered the ranking. Using a simple formula the keywords density can be calculated that is dividing the number of keywords by the total number of words in that page, to find the percentage multiply it with hundred.
Keywords given should be spread across tags like Title, Heading, and Body, most important in the Alt and Anchor tags. Some smart people put the keywords in places that are no way related to the existing content. Search engines are smarter these days as they check for the content to know whether the keywords used in the right place and sensibly.
But if keywords are used beyond the required limit, chances are more for a search engine to even ban the website for spamdexing. If the keywords are less than the required limit of the search engines, it may hamper the visibility of your website. But keeping in mind the keyword density one should write the content, by repeating the keywords at regular intervals very care fully.
So many online tools have come to the help of SEO engineers to find the percentage of keywords or keyword density uses them to get the right number of keywords or just use the simple formula given above.