Keyword density: How much is too much????

I read somewhere that you should repeat at least 3 times your targeted keywords in the body of your website.
I was wondering if there is an upper limit on how much you can repeat your keywords before they start hurting you with the search engines (i.e. the search engines discard them as spam).
Anyone here knows????

 

10% is commonly accepted as way too much. 7% is said by some to be ok, but many think it's too much. About 3% is thought to good by many, but some insist on a little more. The most important thing to realize is that your text needs to remain readable for human visitors while you are trying to get 'many' keywords in your text.

do it justice, but don't get crazy

 

Keyword density is not a phrase or even a concept that is used by search engineers at Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

The importance of a keyword or a keyphrase on a page for any given query depends on the content in which the term is used not on keyword density or frequency counts.

Search engines use term vector models but unless you are good at maths you can forget about that as well.

Just write your pages for the user and have your keywords and keyphrases appear naturally on the page.

- Michael

 

I wouldn't mind reading about that - where did you get your information?

 

Here is a 101 on the Vector Model.

Here is Krishna Bharat's (principal scientist at Google) Term Vector Database paper.

Here is Dr. Garcia explaining why "...SEOs/SEMs that spend their time adjusting keyword density values, going after keyword weight tricks or buying the latest "keyword density analyzer" are wasting their time and money" Term Vector Theory.

And more reading from Google Scholar.

Hope that helps...

From an unhealthy addiction to mathematics and years of experience in SEO

- Michael

 

Ha ha, thanks for the info Michael! Looks like I've got some reading to do.

 

Thanks, Michael!

BTW, perhaps you could also provide some links to the "Topic Distillation" papers (except for the widely known paper authored by Monika Henzinger and Krishna Bharat), could you?

Thank you in advance

 

Topic Distillation using Query-Sensitive Tuning and Cohesiveness Filtering

Homepage Finding and Topic Distillation using a Common Retrieval
Strategy

Automatic Topic Identification Using Webpage Clustering (PostScript file)

Analyzing fine-grained hypertext features for enhanced crawling and topic distillation

- Michael

 

Thank you VERY much, Michael
You rock!

 

Some of the information above frightens me. While I agree with all that's been previously stated, it's nice to have a "working model" for developing content that's palatable to the SEs, and the maths thing is probably too much work.

So, based on my experience, and what I've read, here are some GENERAL guidelines:

1. Keyword density of 3% - 6%
2. Keywords at very beginning of page, somewhere in body of page, and at very end of page
3. Use of H1 tags, bold, and italics to emphasize keywords, but NOT simultaneously.

I say GENERAL because the most important factor is readability - if your content doesn't read naturally, and isn't a good experience for your visitors, you'll find it difficult to achieve long-term success. So these guidelines should be secondary to writing quality, readable content.

HTH,
Sam

 

Sam, you're absolutely damn right

But please try to get in top 10 for some highly competitive *adult* keyword (for example) - you'll see that it's [almost] impossible to do this with your GENERAL guidelines