Understanding keywords and keyword density is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Keywords are the words and phrases that best represent what your webpage is about. Keyword density is the number of times those words and phrases appear. Getting a good keyword density on your webpage is all about balance. You want the words and phrases to appear enough times to optimize the page, but not so often that the readability of the content is compromised.



A good keyword density is important because it will be the primary driver of targeted contextual ads to your webpage through ad networks like Google Adsense and it is one of the most important factors in ranking your website in the search engines.

As mentioned above you do not want to overload your content with keywords. There is very little reason to drive targeted traffic to your website if the content on the landing page is so garbled with keywords it is impossible to read. The visitor will just hit the "back" button. Additionally if you have too many keywords in your content the search engines might classify you as SPAM.

Keyword density is represented as a percentage. For instance, to find the keyword density of an article simply divide the keywords found in the article by the total number of words in the article. A 1000 word article with 100 keywords in it would have a density of 10% (100 / 1000 = .10, move the decimal point over two places to get the percentage)

Different search engines have various tolerances for how many keywords they will allow on a webpage before they consider it spamming. To be safe always keep your keyword density below 5%. I always recommend playing it fairly conservatively with keyword density, personally I try not to go over 2% - In fact it seems that the magic number for Google is somewhere between 1% - 2%. Also many article directories will not accept articles that repeat keywords more than 2% of the time.

Affiliate marketers must always focus on their keyword density. In fact keyword research in general is probably more important for an affiliate marketer than any other type of online business. The competition in the affiliate marketing world can be fierce. The ability to find good targeted keywords with low competition can be the difference between success and failure, but it is only half the equation.

If a quality keyword with relatively low competition is found (think long tail keywords here), then the affiliate marketer has an excellent chance of attaining a first page ranking for that keyword if they can successfully optimize their web pages and articles for it – And what's the key to good optimization? You guessed it: Getting the keyword density right.

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process, but if you spend a little time on your keyword research and pick quality long tail phrases that you focus your articles and web pages on, you will be shocked at how much your performance as an affiliate or internet marketer will increase.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you are building a new marketing campaign and you will definitely see positive results.