No golden rule, but somewhere in the middle single digit percentages, anywhere from 2-8% or so. The main thing is that the content is optimized. Notice that the content is optimized, rather than the optimization having content - if you follow my drift. What I'm getting at is that your priority is slick, user friendly, natural content - if you do this then it doesn't matter whether its 2% or 10%.
You can help your overall density by referring directly to your main subject instead of using words like 'it'. For example... Bad example- SEO will bring in targeted traffic from the search engines. 'IT' is an easy but long term technique to use. Good example- SEO will bring in targeted traffic from the search engines. 'Search Engine Optimization' is an easy but long term technique to use. In both examples the reader will know what you are talking about but this is a natural way to use related keywords which helps your articles rank higher.
Here's a nifty, field-tested trick to make it even more obvious to Google what a page is about: if your page is about "green widgets" and that is the term you want to rank for, make sure that one instance of the term "green widgets" is a link that points to a high-ranking but non-competitive page for the query "green widgets". A Wikipedia page is generally a good choice. The SEO benefit of this technique is PHENOMENAL.
i've been using around 3%-4% these days which works fine for me. based on the page i create and the kind if content it has, sometimes i even use around 1%+ or so. keyword density is not much of a big deal anymore. its the quality of content and the quality of backlinks that matter most
I agree! 3%-4% keyword density is good. Besides LSI is also an important factor to judge your page for a particular keyword.
Based on many sources that I read, 5%-7% seems the best. It is not just a matter of percentage, but also having a higher keyword density at the beginning of your page. It seems that Google pay more attention for a particular keyword if it finds more often in the part of your page visible to the user. Let's says the first screen page.
Even 1% is enough in some cases. I believe it depends on your site structure, onpage SEO and content. In my opinion it's not a fixed value but rather a more complex algorithm.
I actually tested this and broke it down by percentages, I chose a few master pages and I ran the analysis on keyword density for title, tags, body, and much more. I don't want to post a link, but you can find it on tastyplacement-dot-com Google this: tastyplacement keyword density
There is not "optimum" keyword density any more. Keyword density is not the major factor in ranking algorithms that it used to be 6-8 years ago. The optimum keyword density is whatever sounds natural... as if you were explaining the topic of your page to a friend or neighbor. Remain focused on the topic of the page, but if you're thinking of keyword density when you're writing an article or developing the content for a web page then you are overthinking it IMO. Keyword density within the <title> element, within the <h1> and <h2> elements, and within link text used to link to the page are FAR more important than keyword density within the content of the page IMO.
I disagree with the above post. Keyword density i a major factor. Make sure the keyword is in the title, domain/sub-domain if possible, in the h1 tag and at least 5 times throughout your article, including the first sentence of the opening paragraph.
Search engines do not calculate keyword density and probably never have. Four years ago in the information retrieval expert Dr. E. Garcia demolished the myth of keyword density as a metric with The Keyword Density of Non-Sense. I think the reason some people think keyword density is an important percentage is because it is easy to calculate. Also, if you know absolutely nothing about information retrieval, keyword density seems at first sight like it might be a useful measure. If you think that you have observed a change in ranking after you have changed the keyword density what you are actually observing is the effect of changes in the local and global term weighting, and the normalization factor for the page as a result of adding or subtracting keywords. Since you cannot control global term weighting or normalization factors you could repeat the same process a month later and get the opposite result. Do the math rather than buy the myth. - Michael
It looks like we do not have a consensus about the keyword density. May be it is a myth. I heard a lot of guess about the percentage. May be Google will penalize you if you use too many times the keywords. There is a term for this "keyword stuffing" or "keyword spamming". For example, using 50% keyword density. That does not make sense for a normal user. It might have worked well in the early stage of the search engine, but today search engine are wiser. This looks really true and I think it makes sense. I have not seen any official documents from search engines if 7% keyword density is better than 3%. Probably it is just a range to consider if your page is normal and the other SEO aspects tell your ranking. Otherwise, keyword density would just be used to say if the keyword is present or not and it you are trying to spam search engines. Anyway, I do not have the official information from search engines. Did anyone check the patent from Google for the PageRank? This would be the most official source of information and probably any SEO statistics based on extensive tests from Internet gurus.