Keyword Density Checker

About Keyword Density Checker

 

Whenever a webmaster or blogger searches for something in Google you only see what ranks. You don't see the hundreds or thousands of pages that have been filtered for pushing too hard. Keyword density is the percentage calculated based on the number of times a keyword occurs inside the content of a webpage divided by the total word count.

If you are in the dark on what density levels are reasonable, consider patterning your perspective after what is working right now.

1. search for your target keyword in Google

2. grab 5 of the top-ranked pages from the search results

3. analyze each of them in a separate tab using this tool

Always remember that some extremely trusted brands rank more based on their brand validity and strength than the on-page content, thus if you are creating content for a newer & less-trusted website you would likely be better off putting more weight on results from smaller & lesser-known websites which still managed to rank well in Google.

Mention a keyword or phrase too many times and search engines will likely frown at your site. Do it a little less than necessary and search engines may not pick up enough signals to rank the page for that particular keyword.

Keyword density checker is the calculation in percentage from the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words on a webpage. The simplest method of calculating keyword density is usually to divide the number of times a particular keyword is mentioned in a text by the total number of words in the text and then multiply the result by one hundred to get your percentage.

What should my Keyword Density be?

There is no single optimal or universal keyword density percentage. Each search query is unique & search engines compare (or normalize) documents against other top documents to determine some of their specific thresholds. Some keywords like credit cards" naturally appear as a two-word phrase, whereas other terms may be more spread out. Further, some highly trusted websites with great awareness, strong usage data & robust link profiles can likely get away with more repetition than smaller, less trusted sites can.

As a general rule-of-thumb, when it comes to keyword frequency...

1. From a trusted corpus of internal content (like someone's internal site search, or a database of select known trusted content authors), higher is generally better

2. From a broad corpus of external content (like general web search, where many people have an incentive to try to game the system), less is generally better

How important is keyword density for SEO?

For today’s search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) keyword density is just a very small factor when it comes to ranking pages for a specific keyword. It is, however, important to use your focus keyword(s) inside all the important on-page elements: Title tag, Meta description, H1, body, alt tag, and internal links to make sure search engines understand your content.

In addition to the on-page elements, off-page factors like backlinks and anchor text still play a major role for search engines when indexing and ranking your web pages.

The best keyword density is like the ideal content length… A question asked by many and luckily answered by few. There is no exact answer to this question because it all depends on the topic you write about. Some topics are ideal for long content forms and a lot of related keywords and synonyms. On the other hand, you have the topics that are best served with a compact piece of content and a higher repetition of the same keywords. The best advice on this topic is to write natural and for human users instead of computers algorithms and crawlers.

Important ranking factors

Search engines may place significant weight on domain age, site authority, link anchor text, localization, and usage data.

Each search engine has its weighting algorithms. These are different for every major search engine.

• Each search engine has its vocabulary system which helps them understand related words.
• Some might place more weight on the above domain-wide & offsite factors, while others might put a bit more weight on on-page content.
• The page title is typically weighted more than most any other text on the page.
• The meta keywords tags, comments tags, and other somewhat hidden inputs may be given less weight than page copy. For instance, most large-scale hypertext search engines put zero weight on the meta keyword tag.
• Page copy that is bolded, linked, or in a heading tag is likely given greater weighting than normal text.

Weights are relative

• If your whole page is in an H1 tag that looks a bit off, it does not place more weight on any of the text since all the page copy is in it.
• You probably want to avoid doing things like bolding H1 text as it is doubtful it will make a page seem any more relevant.

Excessive focus on density

When people focus too much on keyword density they often write content that people would not be interested in reading or linking.

Lots are queries are a bit random in nature. Roughly 20% to 25% of search queries are unique. When webmaster tweaks up page copy for an arbitrarily higher density, they typically end up removing some of the modifier terms that were helping the page appear relevant for many 3, 4, 5 & 6-word search queries.

Semantically related algorithms may look at supporting vocabulary when determining the relevancy of a page. If you pulled the keyword phrase you were targeting out of your page copy would it still be easy for a search engine to mathematically model what that phrase was and what your page is about given the supporting text? If so, then your rankings will be far more stable AND you will likely rank for a far wider basket of related keywords.

The virtuous keyword density helps you to enhance the ranking of your webpage on search engines. To check whether you used the right density, you can use the free keyword density checker tool.