Keyword Density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page.

A lot of people ask me what the Optimum Keyword Density is for their site. This answer, along with just about everything else in SEO, is complicated. Of course, search engines don’t want you to know what the answer to this question is, if they did release that information every spammer in the world would clog the listings with junk pages.

From my experience, deciding on a correct keyword density percent will require knowledge of several factors. First, in my opinion your density percent is going to very based on what industry your keywords fall into. Online Dating is going to very from lets say paper bag. You also need to take into account the competitive nature of the keywords, weather or not they are commercial, are the adult related, and so on.

I advise people who are looking for a general starting point that anything over 2% might be risky. That’s not to say I haven’t gone above the two percent mark, I have quite often. I just use the two precent rule as a starting point. In other words you are going to be pretty safe no matter what if you stay around the two percent and under mark.

Several years ago when the Paris Hilton video came out webmasters we scrambling to nail top spots for. I took a risk, I coded the page with a 25% Keyword Density Ratio. My risk payed off, I held the number one spot for Paris Hilton Video for three weeks straight. After that three weeks no one was really looking for it anymore anyway, so I made off like a bandit.

That just goes to show you that sometimes deviating from the accepted knowledge sometimes has it’s advantages.