Keyword Density – How much is TOO much?

I happened upon a rather interesting website the other day…There are many differing schools-of-thought on the topic of keyword density:

It is widely accepted that for a website to be considered well-optimised, there must be an occurence of keywords that are relevant to the topic of the website. It stands to reason that a site about shoes will probably have some text containing the word “shoes”. Perhaps there will be variants on this, such as “pumps”, “trainers”, “brogues” or “stilletos”.

Fortunately, the clever people at Google apply something called “latent semantic indexing” which applies similar principles to a thesaurus when they are indexing websites. The more Google’s algorithms evolve, the more wise they get to people trying to scam their way into a high search result by cramming as many keywords into some text as they can.

For this very reason, most sensible copywriters will try to make their on-site text as natural as possible. Whilst they will of course try to put necessary keywords in, the text needs to appear natural and to be readable by actual human-beings as well as Google’s spiders.

Every now and again though (if you’re looking in the right places) you may find something like this:

keywordkeywordkeywordkeyword

Being the helpful citizen that I am, I made a comment under the name “Getting Out Of Debt” as I was concerned that they hadn’t got quite enough keywords in there!