There are many elements to finding and using keywords in the right way. One of the most important is keyword frequency or keyword density. This is simply a measure of the percentage of times that a keyword shows up in your on site SEO and your articles.

Most online article directories will let you know, in no uncertain terms, if they feel you are keyword stuffing and trying to get an unfair advantage by using too many keywords for your article.

They will make you delete some of the keywords if you have too many. But what is too many? That can be tricky. It really depends on what you are doing with the keywords. SEO may have different requirements than article marketing, for example (and not all article directories will let you know right away if they think you have too many keywords, some will simply not approve your article).

One of the best rules of thumb is to remember that you are writing for people, not search engines. If your writing style has a fluid easy to read flow, that is what is most important.

Often, of course it does depend on what your keyword is, it is not easy to maintain the fluidity of a piece of writing if you try to stuff too many keywords in it.

Another good rule of thumb is to keep your single word keywords to no more than 6% of the total word count and maintain a 3% ratio for long tailed keywords of three or more words. These averages will need to be adjusted depending on your niche, but it is a place to start.

There are several programs online that will help you calculate the percentage of keywords in your article but one method is simply to do a ‘find all’ search in Word. This will highlight the chosen text, in this case your keywords.

That will give you a visual representation of how many times your keyword appears. While it isn’t a percentage it will give you a clearer picture of what your keyword density really is. If you have keywords in several sentences in each paragraph that is probably way too many and you should simply make some changes to the text.

Using software and searching in a Word document can give you a good idea of how many keywords you have in any given piece. But the best overall thing to do is to read your article out loud and make sure it flows.

When you do that it will immediately sound odd if one word or phrase keeps showing up over and over again. Even if it makes sense in the context of the sentence, it is just not a natural way of speaking to keep repeating the same word or phrase all the time.

Even if your keyword can be put in the article many times and still make sense, it still doesn’t mean that is should be in every single paragraph, that is simply too much and it won’t seem natural.

Remember, the whole point of writing articles is to entice the reader to visit your website. That will be hard to do if they stop reading your article because it seems weird or ‘off’. Keep the keyword frequency to within reasonable limits, as I’ve defined above. You will get much better response from your articles if you do.