How much keywords is too much, I checked keyword density for my site and I am ranking 17.65  for one keyword, is that good or bad?

Keyword Density is like...sooooo 20th century :0)

Try looking into phrase stuff;

http://www.site-reference.com/articles/ … ation.html

or related discussions; http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/ … rch-world/

To be honest honing or overtly tracking densities could be a signal all in itself to a search engine. Write nturally as that is how they could detect spam (from too high an occurance than the norm)

..but think in phrases more than single word densities...

By the written word : 4.5%

In reality, I've viewed many sites in top ten Google positions with density in 20's and 30's %.
Google like good theme related content.

Personally, I will write an article on a particular subject without even thinking about keywords.
When finished, I then calculate the most relevant Keyword Phrase used.
I will then go and analyze the keyword phrase to measure it's search popularity against competing pages.
If the results look good and then do other "on-page" and "off-page" optimization to achieve high ranking for the page the article is on. So in fact, I perform a sort or reverse optimization technique.

Hope this helps,
Koolsteve

So, your saying 4.5-30%? What kind of Vodoo math is that my friend?

Once again think in terms of related phrases not only target terms. It is not as much about kw densities as it is about related terms, phrases and concepts that one would naturally find. You see search egineers can set baselines as to what constitutes a clean signal for a given search query. There is a probability, an expectation of finding other terms and related phrases when assessing a given document. By using such natural occurance metrics not only can relevance (quality) be potentially ascertained, but Spam can be found as well (or less relevant documents filtered out). Your KW density my actually work against you by having an unnatural or artificial count.

Write natually...not for search engines :0)

Furthermore, if you get into probabilistic modelling for user behavior, a poorly written page will have a higher bounce rate and would potentially even further devalue the page....

Write quality content for users... not for search engines :0)

....so what's the lesson today? he he.... together now....

TheGypsy wrote:

Keyword Density is like...sooooo 20th century :0)

Thanks for making us all feel just a tad bit older.

The exact point is to write for the visitors and not for the search engines. When you write naturally, even a 15% density is natural but when you write artificially, even a 2% can be detected as spammy by search engines.

They have sophisticated text analyzing programs and can easily detect how you write.