Keywords are like little flags that search engines use to find your site. If you want to get more people to find your site, you should put up as many flags as possible, right? If you are keyword stuffing your website, then you are probably going to lower your page ranking in the search engines. This is because search engines look for keywords, but they also look for quality content. If your articles just repeat the same word over and over, they are likely to be passed up by the search engines.

So how do you know how much is too much? There is a complicated and confusing science to a search engines algorithm. The exact number of times that you should use a keyword is not known. But SEO experts do have a couple of guesses for you. Most people say that having a keyword density of 3% or lower is ok. If you want to be safe though, you should keep your keyword stuffing down to somewhere between 1 and 2%. This means that for every 100 words, you can use a keyword approximately one time. Matt Cutts, from Google wrote an article, Avoid Keyword Stuffing that I had to include with this post, as it’s…a very interesting approach to discuss the topic.

Do I really have to count every time I use a keyword? That is one way that you can keep track. If you count as you write your SEO articles, you will have less editing to do when you are finished. Another quick way to find out how many keywords you have used is by using the word count function on many word processors. You can also use the find, or search and replace function, to help you determine your keyword density.

Keyword stuffing is especially important if you are using article directories to submit your articles. Some directories will not accept your article if it is too dense with keywords. You should probably check with your directories guidelines to find out exactly how much is too much.