My opinion is that that article sucks... Keyword density is very important for SEO. It isn't sure which is the optimum KD, but most of the people consider that 7% is optimal. You can go to 10-12%, but this can get you banned a frind of mine got banned for some keywords because of that
Seems unlikely to me. I think the article at http://www.seo-blog.com/keyword-density.php makes a lot of sense. See also: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000754.shtml http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Mar05/garcia.html
The last link is interesting... Ministrel, a couple of months ago, some pages of mine were not in the first 2 pages of Gugal for the keywords i was fighting for. Than we tried to improve the KD, and after 1 week we were in the first page in the SERPs. So i still beleive in KD...
Honestly, I have never paid any real attention to keyword density. My advice is simple: 1. Write so that it looks like your page was created by a human being for your visitors, not by a spam-generator-bot, and make sure it describes what the page is about - do that, and your primary search terms for that page will in all likelihood show up on the page a couple of times. 2. Then, if you find relevant search terms for which you don't rank very well, try to work those additional words into the page content, again in a "natural" not spammy way 3. Do what you can to use the major search terms in anchor text in your backlinks (e.g., from other sites, directories, even internal linking) 4. Make sure the most important search terms are included at the beginning of your page title 5. Use image <alt> text that is related to your images but also includes important search terms
Minstrel gives good advice. I write for my visitors but I do also check my density. I try to stay between 5-7% for that pages key term. Anything more and it just looks spammy. Remember, with a strong site all you need is for the search term to apper ONE time on the page and it will likely rank good. The sites that have to keyword stuff to get to the top don't belong there anyways, and won't last long there.
Keyword density is somewhat of a myth perpetuated by articles that do the rounds and then get spouted as 'fact' rather than the speculative guessworks they originally began as. Dr. Garcia's article headline sums it up very well: "The Keyword Density of Non-Sense"