So what is the typical article marketing keyword density? Or does keyword density really matter at all? These are questions that many new and not so new article marketers are asking every day.

Back in the day, marketers used to turn out hundreds of badly written articles repeating the same keywords over and over. At that time, the search engine algorithms were very basic. Search engines used to assume that any article that contained the keyword many times must be very relevant, and give it top position in their results. But of course, that led to people gaming the system, which in turn made the search engines develop more sophisticated ways of ranking web pages.

These days, the results are based on a combination of keywords, other related words and phrases (latent semantics), and many other factors. Of course, it is still important to have your target keyword appear in a typical article marketing submission, and appear more than once. But where exactly should you put it?

Typical article marketing principles say that your main keyword must be in your title. In fact, it is best if it forms the very first words of your title.

It also needs to be in the first line of the article, as near to the beginning as possible. Also, it’s good if it appears in the last paragraph. Then you want it to appear a couple more times. In total, the keyword should appear approximately once for every 100 words of the article (not counting the title), or a little more.

So that is a keyword density of 1% to 1.5%. This will be fine with typical article marketing directories. On your own website, you can go higher if you want. But ezinearticles.com, for example, will probably reject your article if the keyword density is over 2%.

Make sure that similar keywords appear in the article too. So if your main keyword is ‘article marketing’ then it’s good to have phrases like ‘affiliate marketing’, ‘internet marketing’ and ‘writing articles’ appear in your article. This will please the search engines and draw more visitors who were searching for those terms.

Something else that will help you is to have your keywords in bold. Again, this is easy on your own website. It is a little harder if you are submitting to the article directories, because they may not like a lot of random bold type in your articles.

The way to get around this is to divide your article into sections, and add a heading before each section. Bold the headings (which looks completely natural) and have your keyword appear in one or two of the headings. Automatically you have your keyword in bold in the article.

Extra tip: this is also a great way to handle the situation where you have a weird sounding keyword that is hard to put into a normal flowing sentence: for example, ‘train dog’. You don’t often say ‘train dog’, do you? It’s usually train YOUR dog, train THE dog, etc. But you can put ‘train dog’ into a subsection heading. Most article directories will see that as a typical article marketing subheading and approve it.