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 One of these outdated techniques is “keyword density,” but somehow this approach remains popular.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.