Keyword Density Checker

What keyword density is good for

Not what most tools selling it claim.

The number this page gives you is a description, not a target. It tells you which terms a page repeats, which is a reasonable proxy for what a reader will come away thinking it was about. That is genuinely useful. What it will not do is tell you how to rank.

The 1 to 2 percent rule was never a rule

It has been repeated for so long that it reads like documentation, but Google has never published a density target and has said several times that there isn't one. Search stopped counting term frequency as a primary signal well over a decade ago, and the systems that replaced it work on meaning rather than repetition.

Writing to a percentage now does one of two things. Either it changes nothing, or it makes the page worse by wedging a phrase in where the sentence did not want one, which readers notice even when they cannot say why.

What to actually look at

A term you expected and cannot find. You wrote a page about CSV imports and "import" is not in the top ten. That usually means you wrote around the subject, using a different word each time, which leaves the page about nothing in particular.

A term at the top that you did not intend. If the most repeated phrase on a product page is the name of a competitor, or a piece of internal jargon nobody searches for, the page is about the wrong thing.

Something repeated far more than everything else. A term at four times the next one down usually reads as clumsy rather than optimised.

None of those are percentages. They are all comparisons.

How the list is built

Single words drop the stop words. Otherwise "the" is first, every time, in every text.

Phrases are treated less bluntly: one is dropped only when it starts or ends with a stop word. "of the importer" goes, "the importer" goes, and "importer for the API" stays, because that middle stop word is part of a phrase people actually type into a search box.

Phrases never cross a full stop. "the importer. Support tickets" is two sentences, not a phrase, and joining them invents a term nobody wrote.

Multi-word phrases need at least two occurrences to be listed. A three word phrase seen once is a fragment, and a list of them buries the two that repeat.

What else to check on the page

The word counter gives the length and, more usefully, the longest sentence, which is the other thing on a page a reader will trip over.

If you are comparing a rewrite against the original, the text diff shows exactly which words changed, which is a better way to check a rewrite kept its subject than running both through here and squinting at two lists.

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