Keyword Density

Keyword density is the share of a page made up of a particular search term: the phrase repeated so many times across so many words. For a stretch of the early web this genuinely was a ranking factor, because early search engines largely counted words. An industry grew up around hitting a target percentage, and the habits from that era have proved remarkably hard to kill.

It stopped working a long time ago. Search engines moved to judging meaning rather than tallying repetitions, and the systems reading the web today are language models — machines built specifically to understand what a passage says, not how often it says a word. To them, density is not a weak signal. It is not a signal.

Worse, it can count against you. A page that repeats a phrase unnaturally reads as spam to precisely the machines you are hoping to impress, and reads badly to the human being who lands on it. Paying a retainer every month to have a term sprinkled through your pages can leave you fractionally worse off than having done nothing at all.

There is a true sentence buried underneath, and it is worth keeping. The words you use do matter — once. If your customers ask about an emergency plumber and your site only ever says rapid-response hydraulic solutions, no machine will connect you to the question. Speaking your customers' vocabulary is real work. It is also an afternoon of it, done once and revisited rarely. It was never a subscription.

The human translation is the difference between saying a thing and saying a word repeatedly. Nobody has ever been persuaded by the second. The machines are, in this narrow respect, exactly like people.