SEO Best practice #3 - Keyword Density Myth

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase "keyword density" gets on the way.  
This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced
methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth, we'll simply reference Dr. Edel Grcia's seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.
The notion of keyword density value predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an information retrieval concept. What is worse, keyword density plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weights to terms. Why then do many optimizers still believe in keyword density values? The answer is simple: misinformation.


Dr. Garcia's background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help "optmize" a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization - without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet's collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.