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The internet is a beautiful and wonderful place, full of mysteries, limitless information, and funny videos of cats getting stuck in boxes. For those of you looking to tap into the vast resources of the internet, you will need to get traffic, and to do that effectively, search engine optimization techniques will be required. However, SEO can be surprisingly complex.

There are many tactics you can use to great benefit, but there are also tactics that will get you precisely nowhere. Knowing the difference between the two is shockingly difficult, especially since the what worked five years ago may not work today. One of these outdated techniques is “keyword density,” but somehow this approach remains popular. So, what is keyword density and why does this myth have such unearned staying power?

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the idea that your rank in the search engines for any given keyword is determined by how often the keyword is repeated on your webpage. Density, also known as “keyword saturation,” is usually displayed as a percentage. If you repeated your keyword once every one hundred words on your page, you would have “one percent density.”

Why has it stuck around?

From the earliest days of the internet up to about 2005, keyword density was an easy to manipulate and highly important factor in the major search engine algorithms. A webmaster could simply repeat their keyword over and over again in an attempt to sway search engine results. While the search engines then changed their approach in order to get more relevant websites, keyword density remained in peoples minds as the “fast and easy” approach. After all, between 2001 and 2005, your rank on major search engines, most notably Altavista, was directly related to how close you were to 2.3% keyword density.

This is also when much of the original search engine optimization began to surface. The combination of the age of the information, how successful it used to be, and how easy it once was, have kept the myth around long after its demise as a practical solution.

In a previous entry, we discussed what keyword density is and why it is still used so commonly, despite the fact that it is no longer a major part of any of the search engine algorithms. To help you fully understand saturation, and how it became a decrepit shell of a technique, this entry will go into the history of keyword density.

In the early days of the search engine, density was one of the best tools to determine how relevant your site was to the topic. It was a relatively major upgrade. Prior to the use of density, the search engines and directories, their predecessor, simply accepted the information submitted by webmaster. With keyword density playing a role in the search engine results, you could rest assured that the site you visited at least contained the words you searched for.

Different search engines preferred different amounts of keyword saturation. AltaVista became famous for how it handled keyword saturation with SEO, since targeting your density to exactly two-point-three percent meant that your site would almost certainly land on the front page. As people began figuring out how the search engines handled this information, webmasters began abusing keyword saturation techniques.

It went beyond merely repeating the keyword a few times to get the desired results. Users would “stuff” keywords into the text, repeating a large number of keywords in a nonsensical paragraph at the bottom of the page. They would create multiple pages with identical information, just to fill up the entire page of results with different locations on their site.

The search engines responded by altering their algorithms, with Google leading the way in adopting alternate methods for ranking sites. By the mid 2000s, link relevance soared above saturation as an important factor. By 2006, all the major search engines gave keyword saturation little or no relevance in the ranking of the site. As of 2010, none of the top ten search engines give keyword saturation and repetition any weight. As such, any webmaster or content writer should focus on creating quality content that’s likely to get links – not keyword repetition.