Keyword Density Analyzer — Target Density + Top 20 Keywords

There is no correct keyword density

Keyword density is the share of a page's words made up by one target phrase. It reads like a metric with a right answer, and it does not have one. Google has said plainly that it works to no keyword-density target, so the percentages passed around as rules — some range to sit inside, some threshold that means stuffing — are folklore. This page repeats none of them.

Where the idea came from, and why it stopped being true

Early search engines really did lean on term frequency, because counting a word is easy and understanding a page is hard. Repetition therefore worked, and writers responded exactly as you would expect: the phrase went into every paragraph whether it belonged or not.

Search engines closed that off. Ranking now works on meaning and context, and a page about timing work sessions is recognised as such through timer, interval, break and focus without needing one phrase hammered fifty times. The density number survived the system that made it meaningful — which is why writing toward a percentage is optimising for an algorithm that has not existed for years.

The harm is real even though the metric is not

A target you can hit is a target you will hit, and the damage shows up in the prose:

• Sentences padded so the ratio comes out right.
• The keyword wedged in where a pronoun was the natural choice, over and over.
• Repetition a reader can feel, which reads as writing aimed past them at a machine.
• Attention spent counting instead of spent covering the subject.

What the number is genuinely good for

Read it as a repetition check on a draft you have already written, and two readings are worth acting on.

If your target dominates the top-20 list by a wide margin, the draft is probably repetitive. You have most likely drifted into stuffing without meaning to, which happens easily when you are conscious of the keyword while writing. Reread it and let some of those instances become pronouns.

If your target appears nowhere in the top 20, the page may genuinely be about something else. That is not a density problem to fix with insertions — it is a briefing problem, and inserting the phrase would only disguise it.

The top-20 list is the more useful half

The percentage is one number. The frequency list is a picture of what your page is actually about, in the page's own vocabulary, and it regularly disagrees with what the writer assumed.

Common stopwords — the, and, of, is and around sixty others — are stripped before anything is counted, which is why the list shows subject matter rather than grammar. It also means "total content words" is lower than a plain word count, and deliberately so: it is the denominator that makes the percentage mean anything.

What to do instead

Cover the topic properly and use the words someone who knows it would use — including the synonyms, the neighbouring concepts and the specific terms that only come from actually knowing the subject. Frequency then lands wherever it lands, which is the point. Fluency in a subject's vocabulary is visible to a reader in a way no repetition count is.

Why the figure here is trustworthy, even though the target is not

The phrase is matched as a sequence of whole words, so a target of car takes no hits from carpet or scarce. Only the target's own non-stopword words are charged against the total, since the total already had stopwords removed — so the best timer counts as two words rather than three, instead of inflating the result by half again. Word matching is Unicode-aware, and Chinese and Japanese are split per character since they are written without spaces, so a non-English page returns a real count rather than zero.

All of which makes the number accurate. It still is not a target. For the structural read on the same draft, see the heading hierarchy checker.