Keyword density is key in Yahoo and MSN's search engine ranking algorithms, thus, you must consider keyword density heavily while search-engine-optimizing your page. Keyword density is defined on our terms page as

"The density of a specific keyword, the number of times it is shown on the page in relation to the number of words on the page. Usually shown as a percentage."

Since all search engines are different, the keyword density you want to aim for is different for all of them, however, for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) you can usually get by using the same keyword density for them all. Google doesn't really care about keyword density a lot, it cares more about keyword density in anchor links coming in to your page, thus, that is where you should consider it for Google. However, for Yahoo! and MSN they care heavily about on page density, and, you should definitely deal with that!

Search engines like fairly dense keywords, however, they also punish overly dense pages because they look like search engine spam... Back in they day, a search engine wouldn't care about much more than the number of times the word showed up on your page, the more, the higher you'd rank. So people who were doing this as a business and has no ethics would repeat the same word over and over and over millions of times, thus corrupting the results of the search engines. Nowadays, this doesn't work, search engine algorithms have come a long way, you will be punished or even banned from the search engine for doing something like that.

Some SEO Experts will tell you you should keep your keyword density around 5%. I disagree, using the keyword density tool, I'd essentially copy the keyword density of a related and high ranking site, that way, you've got evidence that it works, and if it didn't work for you, you have to go figure out what MORE they are doing than you. Remember, another key part of keyword density is usability, always read your copy before publishing it, make sure it reads-easily, and doesn't feel SEO'd

Keyword positioning matters too! The higher up on the page (or, more accurately, closer to the beginning of the source) has been long speculated to be more valueble than something near the bottom of the page¡­ this is not fact, just speculation, but it sounds good, especially because text "above-the-fold" is more read, thus assumed more important, than text below the fold.

A key part of keyword-density optimization is to make sure you have keywords in a variety of places. Header, footer, body, sidebar/navigation, are all important, however, by a variety of places, I mean more on the code side of things. You should have keywords in as many of the tags as you can, H1-H3 are the most important, H1 should be used only once and should contain the title of your site (hopefully with keywords in it), the others are subheaders and may be used in a variety of places. Another important place to put keywords is in the title, for best search engine optimization it is speculated that keywords near the beginning of your title are more important than keywords near the end, thus, it is speculated that a title like "search engine optimization, search rankings, google, yahoo, msn ¨C RealSEO.net" would be more effective than a title with RealSEO.net at the beginning followed by the keywords. I don't know whether I believe this, but, it doesn't really hurt. Your title should not be formulated as a list of keywords because of the lack of user-friendlyness that comes with that model. Remember, high search engine rankings are only a part of the formula to getting traffic to your site, they have to like the title and description which shows up on the rankings page .

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