Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Based on my experience, I would agree that the URL holds more weight than body text. Years ago, the recommended keyword density was 7%. Lately, the guru's have been saying keep your keyword at 3% to avoid Google penalties, and this does match my experience. My home health care marketing website recently had a PR as low as 2 but still came up #1 in natural search results over PR 6 websites with similar keywords. I don't have a word or phrase density greater than 5% on any of my pages that win their search engine rankings fights.

If your keyword density is 4% or lower, I would guess that Google is simply recognizing your new URL as an entirely new site. You may have lost some PR or relevance if you had external links that no longer match your URL.

I would immediately implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

From Google's perspective (and user's) What you've done is kill one page and create a new one. You're starting over, there is nothing to connect the two.

Implementing the 301 redirect will point the SEs to the new page and inform them that the page has moved, and that it is now available at this new URL.

You could change the URL back but then you'd need to 301 from the new page back to the old one. Messy and it is possible that it is too late.

Changing URLs is tricky. If the URL had no or few valuable backlinks then it is less so. However, you may find that after you implement the 301 that the page may remain lower down in the rankings but eventually come back. And, if you haven't tripped an over optimization penalty (OOP) then the the keyword in the URL could help.

Probably, though, what the page needed was backlinks to move it up rather than a disruptive change to the URL.

Also, I would not focus on keyword density. It's a bit of a dead metric (unless you are too high!). If you add the keyword phrase at the start of the title element and in the copy a few times, that is probably all that needs to be done. Write for visitors. If the keyword is repeated so frequently that the user sees it as a SEO page then you've failed and the SEs will likely see it that way also.

If however you can't find yourself letting go of keyword density, do a density check on the top 3 sites for the exact-match phrase (a search in quotes: "some keyword phrase"). I think you'll find that top pages are typically below 1% and on occasion as high as 1.5%. I'd err to the low side.