Ask an SEO expert what steps you should take to rank well and creating high-quality content will be among them.
A rather grey area of creating that content is keyword density. It’s important to nail this because mentioning keywords too often, or too infrequently, will impact the ranking potential of that content in Google.
Here’s the bottom line: go in too hard and Google will think you’re keyword stuffing. Go in too soft and Google probably won’t pick up on the keywords you want them to.
For example, if ‘baby grow’ appeared 18 times in 600 words, the keyword density would be 3% (for what it’s worth, that’s way too high).
Quality matters greatly to Google, but so does relevancy. To rank for a specific keyword, your content needs to be both of high quality and relevant.
One of the surefire ways to achieve the latter is by engineering keywords into your content and repeating them (other ways include headings, using bold and italics to highlight keywords, and embedding images with alt tags and a good description).
The ideal keyword density is 0.5% to 1%. We base this on having written hundreds of high-ranking web pages since the turn of the year.
1% is enough for Google to take notice without appearing spammy. 0.5% may sound low but mentioning a keyword at the top of an article, in the middle, and at the end is all it is. Your keyword will probably be in a heading too. So call it 4 in 600-words and you’ll be golden.
If you repeat the same keyword more than this, you won’t see any benefit. If you do it excessively, say over 3%, don’t be surprised if you drop like a stone.