I started writing a comment back to a few people that had commented on my blog 6 (now 8) things that are sure to get you banned from Google. Keyword stuffing was one of the things that a lot of bloggers were interested in. As I wrote, I found my comment getting quite lengthy so I decided to break of into a separate blog.
One way to be sure that you are not "keyword stuffing" is to write fresh, unique and compelling content. Again the idea is to keep your user (a human) in the front of your mind while writing. If your topic is truly relevant to the keyword term, you will have no problem including it in the content in a way that is not considered stuffing.
Here is a little chart that will help you with keyword saturation. When the chart indicates less then 1 (.05, .07, etc.) It refers to partial matching. What that means is that if my term is "Ulster County Real Estate" and I use the term "Ulster Real Estate" (not using the "county" word), that is considered a partial match.
Google recommends that you use the keyword term 1 time in the title, 1 time in the meta description, use some form of the term in the heading, 5 times in link text, 10 times in the Hyper-link URL and 10 times in the body text.
Google Averages
| Areas |
Frequency |
Words |
Weight |
Average Prominence |
| Head |
| TITLE tag |
1.0 |
6.7 |
72.0% |
62% |
| META Description tag |
0.7 |
10.8 |
32% |
65.2% |
| Body |
| Headings |
0.5 |
7.9 |
32.1% |
64.9% |
| Link Text |
4.7 |
166.9 |
14.2% |
55.8% |
| Hyper-link URL |
9.2 |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
| Body Text |
9.7 |
618 |
7.8% |
56.2% |
Here is more about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66358