“Keyword Density” (”KD”) is a measure of how many times a word appears on a web page, expressed as a percentage of the total number of words. Of course, very common words, such as ‘the’, ‘for’ and so on tend to dilute the results. Most Search Engines do not consider extremely common words in order to save disk space or to speed up search results. These filtered words are known as “stop words”.

The importance of KD in optimising your pages for the search engines is to try to get just the right proportion of your important keywords - the words through which you want people to find your page when they use the search engines.

If you have too low a KD for your important keywords, then it probably won’t rank very high in the search engine results pages (”SERPS”).

On the other hand, if you go overboard, the search engines will regard your page as having been subjected to “keyword stuffing”, and will penalise your ranking.

Generally speaking, you should aim for a KD of 3 - 7 percent for your important keywords, particularly in the page “Title” tag, in headlines and in the first paragraph.

Clearly, you don’t want to do this word counting and calculating manually! But there’s quite a few online tools to help you check the KD of any page. If you Google the phrase “keyword density”, you’ll find them!

I’ve tried out quite a few of them, and one of the most ingenious is this one:

http://www.IanSays.com/Useful/KDTool.htm

Although it gives a count and density percentage for each significant word on the page, the ingenious part is a visual impression of the KD of each word. It reproduces the textual content of your web page with all the “stop words” left out and shows the words with the highest KDs in various sizes of font.

This helps you to focus attention on your important keywords. I suggest you check out this useful tool. And this site seems to have a lot more SEO tools, which I haven’t checked out yet. But I’ll be returning to have another look.