Keyword Density Checker

What the keyword Density Checker does

Keyword density is the share of a page's words made up by a particular term. It was once treated as a lever you could tune — hit 3% and rank — and that has not been true for well over a decade. Search engines now model topics and synonyms rather than counting repetitions, and a page engineered to hit a density target reads badly to the only audience that matters.

The measurement is still useful, just not as a target. It tells you what your page is actually about, which is often not what you assumed. Run a draft through and find that the most frequent meaningful phrase is a supplier's brand name rather than the product category, and you have learned something the outline did not show you. It also catches accidental repetition, where the same phrase has been used eleven times because each section was drafted separately.

This checker reports single words, two-word phrases and three-word phrases separately, because that is where the information is. Single-word counts are dominated by unavoidable vocabulary; the two- and three-word phrases are what reveal the page's actual subject. Common function words are filtered from the single-word list and from phrases composed entirely of them.

The focus keyword box measures one specific phrase, counting occurrences of the exact sequence rather than the individual words. The verdict bands are deliberately wide: anything from about 0.3% to 2.5% is normal for a page genuinely about that subject, and above 4% is where text starts reading as stuffed. Below 0.3% usually means the subject is never stated plainly, which is a real problem that has nothing to do with density.

How to use it

1. Paste your content — plain text or HTML, in which case leave the strip-tags option on.
2. Enter the phrase the page is meant to be about.
3. Read the two- and three-word tables first; they describe the page's real subject better than single words do.
4. Treat a high density as a prompt to read the text aloud, not as a number to tune down to a target.

A worked example

A 200-word draft about running shoes returns:

That is a healthy profile: the subject is unmistakable and nothing dominates. Now suppose the same draft returned flat feet — 19 × — 10.9%. Nothing would be “penalised” automatically, but read it aloud and you would hear the problem immediately — the phrase would be appearing in almost every sentence, which is what search engines learned to recognise as manipulation long before they learned to recognise topics.

Frequently asked questions