Some SEO experts believe in keyword density and some don’t. I’m talking about keyword density in terms of writing content for your web pages. Does it matter how many times you repeat the keywords and key expressions in your web page copy? Can a 5% increase in the keyword density help you boost your search engine ranking?

It is highly debatable. Of course your keywords and key expressions should appear on the web page being optimized, but just the density of your keywords cannot improve your rankings — many factors play a part in getting you a good ranking, and keywords are just a part of those factors.

With more and more search engines putting greater stress on the contextual relevance, the use of keywords is going to be less important. This involves optimizing pages for what people want, not what they are looking for. For instance, right now if you search for “web designing” you may get lots of results of online web designing tutorials. But there are many search engine users who search for web designing even if they are actually looking for a web designing company. Contextual relevance gives more importance to the actual message, not just the keywords.

Having said that, a certain number of keywords in your web page copy still rule the roost. It’s not necessary that every single sentence on your web page should have your keywords. Just take care that your keywords/key expressions appear twice or thrice on your web page, and also,

• your keywords should appear as anchor text
• your keywords should appear within all the important tags such <h1>, <strong>, and <li>

Generally you put the main points as headlines or bulleted lists. So if your keywords appear within these tags, the search engine ranking algorithm thinks that your page has some relevant information regarding this particular keyword or key expression.