Keyword density is just one of those so called factors that often leads people into dangerous areas, where they spend long periods of time trying to get that perfect balance of keyword density in relation to other website content.

The truth is, keyword density has NO place in the true and common place SEO market, that is, between good search engine optimisation agencies, you will rarely hear anything about keyword density levels.

Why is keyword density a myth? It’s a myth because if keyword density was truly an important factor, it would be incredibly easy for competitors to continually push one another out of the way simply by adjusting keyword frequencies.

We would see a forever changing set of page 1 results, competitors would be throwing one after another out of the way with simple adjustments. This idea is unrealistic, and thankfully, is a false fact and not fiction.

Keyword density may have been a ranking factor in Google’s early years, but this would have been quickly dismissed by search engine algorithms, purely because of the nature that they can be directly influenced by the webmaster, leading to more unreliable results.
Search engines such as Google need good ranking evaluation factors, this will typically focus on factors not directly affiliated with the websites webmaster, secondary ranking factors will be more down to the webmaster.

Keyword density has and still is a commonly referred to factor, which will usually show up the agency or individual quoting that keyword density is still an important ranking factor.

Of course keywords within your content can be beneficial, but the main focus is the quality of the content and the page conveying the information, there are so many other evaluation factors which alter the credibility of the page depending on the quality of that document.

Google will give more credibility to a document on a particular theme if the website surrounding it is relevant or an authority, otherwise, unrelated items will just remain unranked/unindexed.

Keyword density should be a sign of an SEO agency that hasn’t done its research, instead, a good search agency will always identify the core factors that affect a websites position and not the bits that can be used towards extra sales.

So how exactly does Google evaluate the quality of content?

This has to be one of the most confusing things to answer, but in principle the answer is really simple. Google uses familiarisation tactics along with strict filtering to accomplish what would otherwise be a human’s job.

Imagine you were a search engine, and for the keyword “Cars” you had 10,000,000 pages indexed, with this many pages indexed, you could easily build a pattern to evaluate good content from.

Google will use its internal sets tool to look for patterns and similar keywords, so, if you see the keyword cars, what other keywords could relate to it? The answer? Thousands of keywords, everything from Vauxhall Astra to Alloy Wheels.

Google will look through its index to create evaluation factors based on the search market. Google has to establish what your search query is in relation to, if you search “Cars” is it because you are looking to buy a car? Read about a car? Learn how to fix a car?. This all comes down to Google’s (AUTOMATED) evaluation abilities thanks to its algorithm.

When frequent patterns are spotted between a large volume of websites, these are then double checked independently to ensure that the quality factors have been evaluated correctly. These patterns are then used along with other ranking factors such as backlinks to conclude the websites value. This value will dictate the websites position for its relative keywords.

The Google sets pattern is ideal, as it helps to place websites with good content in the more prominent places. If Google takes a particular market and indexes millions of websites from it, the frequency of keywords used across the whole spectrum of websites will be analysed, other frequency factors will come into play along with the websites backlinks.

This system has been revised and improved over the years, and has become more accurate. This is a frequent cause of authoritive websites taking a leading placement. This is because authoritive websites are much broader then typical websites and will generally have a larger and wider coverage of the theme meaning higher placements within search engines such as Google.

This process was mandatory for search engines, it is unrealistic to expect any human to be able to evaluate millions of websites a day. Search engines initially used on page factors alone rather than evaluating content, which was why doorway pages become popular in the late 1990’s.
Yahoo was the first search engine to use content evaluation, although no one really knew where they stood with Yahoo as the evaluation methods were unreliable, often leading to poor quality of results.

Google quickly dominated the search market when the algorithm quickly grew into something mysterious, this dark force behind Google which drove quality results to page 1. Conduct a search in Google and get good results, whereas a search in other engines often lead to the user clicking from result to result trying to find a good quality website.

Google’s content evaluation factors quickly become something of a mystery also, but this is where hundreds of thousands, even millions of people went wrong, with too much speculation. If the goal for Google is to return quality results, then the best way to get a number 1 spot is to build a high quality website and ensure all good practices are followed.