What keyword density is
Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears, divided by the total number of words, as a percentage. A 1,000-word article that uses "product directory" 12 times has a density of 1.2% for that phrase.
Search engines stopped rewarding high density a long time ago. Modern ranking systems understand synonyms and topics, so repeating an exact phrase does little beyond a few natural mentions. Overdoing it can read as spam to people and to Google's spam systems.
What to look for
- Your main topic should show up. If the phrase you want to rank for is nowhere in the two or three-word tables, the page is probably not clearly about it.
- Nothing should dominate. One phrase above about 3% usually means the copy was written for a keyword, not a reader. The checker flags those.
- Related phrases help. A page about launching a startup that also mentions "early users", "launch day" and "waitlist" covers the topic in a way a single repeated keyword does not.
Where placement beats repetition
A keyword in the title tag, the H1, the first paragraph and one subheading does more than ten more mentions in the body. Check those with the title tag checker and the heading analyzer.
About stop words
With the stop-word filter on, single words like "the" and "for" are hidden, and phrases may not start or end with one. That keeps "best app" and drops "the best". Turn it off to see raw frequencies.
For overall length and reading time, use the word counter.