Impact of keyword density on a company’s website

Posted by K.Singh-Kronik Media

November 1, 2008

We are a Web Design Company in London offering services to a diverse clientele. Online marketing plays a key focus in the marketing strategy of the company. Like many other companies, we have an active search engine marketing strategy for our web design company’s website. We are constantly trying out new mixes of proven search engine optimisation techniques and are constantly monitoring the effect each step has on our company website’s rank on search engines especially Google.

Search engine marketing is a complex and evolving field. The value and importance of search engine marketing techniques and their effect on the rank of a website changes from time to time. It is common for a search engine optimisation technique to decrease or increase in importance to a great extent. Keyword density is a perfect example of a technique that was once considered one of the effective in determining a website’s rank on search engines which now SEO experts consider overrated. Many search engine experts today argue that keyword density has in fact little or no relevance in determining the rank of a website on search engines.

Whilst I agree that keyword density is not as important as it used to be; it certainly has some relevance. It can safe to state that a website with no occurrence of a keyword will find it difficult or even impossible to rank at the top of the search engine for that keyword.

Nevertheless it is common knowledge in SEO circles that keyword density has reduced in importance. The keyword density in off page elements such as anchor text of back-links certainly has more value than on page keyword density. Nevertheless our experience suggests not overlooking on-page keyword density completely. We would like share one of our recent experiences with keyword density for a reasonably competitive keyword phrase on our web design company’s website.

We were surprised somewhat by the effect of keyword density on the rank of our company’s website on Google. Contrary to the new belief in search engine marketing circles we found that increasing the keyword density of a keyword on a webpage (our homepage in this instance) had a more positive effect on its rank on search engines for the keyword phrase than we initially expected. What had an even bigger impact on the website’s rank was increasing the overall density of the keyword across the entire website. This was achieved by regularly publishing keyword rich blog posts and articles on relevant sections of our company’s website.

Our conclusion hence is that if you are serious about ranking high on major search engines like Google for reasonably competitive keywords then a balance needs to be achieved between the different optimisation techniques. The same applies to SEO as a whole and to its independent elements including keyword density. With regards to keyword density, a combination of techniques needs to be adopted. On page keyword density may not be the most important. Off page keyword density in anchor text of back-links are more significant and should be given more emphasis. However we should not completely discount the effect of keyword density of the most desired keywords on a particular page and also across the site on other pages and links within the website.

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