Keyword Density Checker

How to use 3 steps

Paste your text under Paste Webpage Content.
Add a Specific Target Keyword if you want it tracked.
Press Analyze Density and review the top words and phrases.

Read the full guide

Paste Webpage Content:

Specific Target Keyword (Optional):

Keyword Frequency Report

How this tool works

Keyword density was a ranking factor twenty years ago and has not been one for a long time. Search engines read a page for topic and meaning rather than counting occurrences of a phrase. The measurement is still worth having, but as a check on your writing, not as a score to optimise.

The text is lowercased, stripped of punctuation and split on whitespace. Words of three characters or more are counted, and the eight most frequent are reported with their share of the total. A target keyword is matched as a whole single word, so a two-word phrase entered there will return zero.

Using what it gives you

Ignore the percentage targets: the figures circulated as ideal densities were never published by any search engine. There is no number to hit, and writing towards one makes the page worse.
Read the top eight as a summary: if the most frequent words are not what the page is about, the page is not about what you think it is.
Watch for a word you have overused: a term at four or five per cent almost always reads badly aloud, and that is the real problem rather than the percentage.
Strip the markup first: pasted HTML is counted as text, so tag and attribute names appear in the results as though you had written them.

Full guide

4 min read

Why keyword density stopped mattering, and what to measure instead

A ranking factor that died twenty years ago, what the word count still usefully reveals about a draft, and the five signals worth watching in its place.

Read the guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Specific to the Keyword Density Checker. Broader questions about this category are answered on the category page.

Is there an ideal keyword density?

No. The specific ranges quoted around the web — one per cent, two to three per cent — have no source in any search engine's guidance. They persist because they are easy to repeat.

Why are short words missing from the table?

Words of one or two characters are filtered out, because the results would otherwise be dominated by articles and prepositions. That also means a genuinely short target word will not appear.

Why does my two-word phrase show as zero?

The target field compares whole words after the text has been split on whitespace, so phrases are never matched. Enter a single word, or read the frequency table for each word in the phrase.

Can high density get a page penalised?

Density in itself is not what triggers anything. Keyword stuffing is a spam policy violation, and what identifies it is text that reads as though it were written for a counter rather than a reader — lists of variations, phrases forced into sentences that do not need them.

Does it count words inside HTML tags?

Yes. It has no parser and treats everything you paste as prose, so tag names and attribute values are counted. Paste the rendered text rather than the source.