You can use a Keyword Density Checker Tool to know the status of your site SEO. And as a web publisher, it’s very important not to let Keyword Stuffing kill your SEO strategy for good in SERPs. So, in this article, I am going to teach you some tools and tactics to use and strategies on how to avoid it.
Bearing in mind, whenever you try to optimize your website for search engines, it can be tempting to take shortcuts. Thus, you may want to try tactics that will speed up the process as well as start ranking higher fast.
Generally, when it comes to SERPs optimization, shortcuts and black hat tactics like Keyword Stuffing won’t help you. In fact, they may actually hurt you. That’s why learning how to optimize your website for SEO and conversions is crucial for your site’s success.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
My guess is that you may even be thinking: “if search engines use keywords to match pages with search queries, why not ‘stuff’ as many of them as possible. Especially onto a single page to get it ranked for several highly-searchable keywords?”
According to Alexa, Keyword Stuffing is when a brand fills or “stuffs” a webpage with the same target term in hopes of ranking higher for that term in search engines. While not as popular as it was a few years ago, it’s still used by some brands to try to boost their search visibility. And this is what is called Visible Keyword Stuffing in SEO.
Types of Visible Keyword Stuffing include:
- Unnecessarily repeating words or phrases
- Adding words that are out of context
- Inserting blocks of the same keyword
- Using keywords that are not relevant to the topic of the page
A keyword stuffing example would be a page that is trying to rank for the term “best laptop bag” and using the following copy:
“If you’re looking for the best laptop bag, look no further. Our brand offers the best laptop bag that you could want for business or pleasure. With padding in our liners and a special pocket for your charger, this is the best laptop bag for travel or school.”
Related Topic: What are Search Engines with Examples? Beginners Guideline
In this example, the copy goes overboard with the use of the keyword. The term is used more than the suggested amount of times to match SEO best practices for keyword density. Other examples of visible keyword stuffing include inserting text blocks that just repeat a keyword, and link spamming.
The latter is also known as Spamdexing, and even though it may not be a direct keyword stuffing example, the idea behind it is the same. You’re looking to fill your content with various links, which is interpreted as keyword spamming by search engines and can lead to a penalty.
What Is Keyword Density?
By definition, Keyword Density in SEO is the percentage of times a keyword is used in the copy.
Keyword Density =
(Number of words in copy) / (Number of times keyword appears in copy)
In the example above, the keyword density is 11.75% (there are 47 words, and the keyword appears four times). This percentage is higher than the keyword stuffing percentage threshold. So, while there’s no exact number for proper keyword density, it is a best practice to stick to a 2% keyword density.
Other content creators are smart enough to know not to mess with people’s user experience. So, instead of pushing keywords right in front of their eyes, consequently creating spammy, unreadable text, they simply hide the text. This is the type of Invisible Keyword Stuffing — that isn’t visible to audiences.
This tactic stuffs terms and phrases in places that are hidden from readers.
Types of Invisible Keyword Stuffing include:
- Using text that is the same color as the background
- (to hide words from readers but display them to search engine crawlers)
- Repeating text in the page’s code, meta tags, alt attributes, and comment tags
While both of these types of Keyword Stuffing may lead brands to think they can trick search engines into giving them higher search engine rankings. But, unfortunately, both tactics can actually lead to lower rankings for a website.
Learn More: What Is Keyword Density? How to Use the Keywords Right
Additionally, you can stuff the keyword within the web page’s HTML code, like in the comment, meta, and/or alt tag, where they will also be found by search bots.
The bottom line is that when content creators practice keyword stuffing, they’re consciously optimizing a web page only for search engines, and not for the intended audience — people. And since search engines are designed to serve human readers, they see these manipulation efforts.
And in response, they can even penalize a web page’s rankings.
Why Keyword Stuffing Is Bad For Websites
After reading the Keyword Stuffing example above, you can see one of the most obvious reasons why this is a bad tactic. It creates an awful experience for users. Website content should aim to educate, serve, and engage your readers.
When you stuff your pages with keywords, you are unable to fulfill this purpose. You stop writing for readers and start writing for search engines. And as a result, this creates a poor experience for your audience. Whereby, you’ll likely send users away from your page.
It also increases your bounce rates and drives potential customers from your business.
Learn More: How Keyword Stuffing Affects Site SEO | 5 Solutions to Use
Therefore, while you may think filling your page with keywords will drive more people to your site, it could actually do the opposite. And as a matter of fact, Keyword Stuffing is widely condemned by search engines too, and the activity could lead to a search penalty.
In other words, if you fill your page with needless keywords, it won’t improve your chances of ranking higher. It will decrease them. You could be hit with a Google Penalty that removes your page from search engine results pages (SERPs) altogether.
So, while it might be tempting to game the system, avoid stuffing pages with keywords. Instead, use the following tools and best practices to optimize your pages for keywords the right way. You can read and learn more about How to Use Keywords the Right Way in detail.
What is a Keyword Density Checker Tool?
A Keyword Density Checker Tool will help you Analyze the Keyword Density of the Terms used in your web page(s). Or if there is any Keyword Stuffing in your website content. All you’ll need to do is enter text or Page URL, and the tool will analyze the density of your text just as a search engine would do.
Did you know that the percentage of times a keyword appears on your web page compared to the total number of words on that page can have an impact on the page’s ranking? Sure it does, and it’s called “Keyword Density.” Mention a keyword or phrase too many times and search engines will likely frown at your site.
But, if you do it a little less than necessary, search engines may not pick up enough signals to rank the page for that particular keyword. Simply put, you ought to get your keyword density just right for the best search performance. Not too much, not too little!
But, how can you start calculating how many times keywords appear on a web page or blog post? Can you even do it accurately? It turns out you’ll have to get help from a reliable tool. And that’s where a tool like SST Keyword Density Checker comes in.
How the Keyword Density Checker Tool works
Basically, the Keyword Density Checker is a tool built solely for the purpose of calculating the keyword density of any web page. Whereas, the dev team at Small SEO Tools created the tool after finding out that some marketers were still stuffing their content with loads of keywords even without realizing it.
This left their websites suffering as Google does not want you to cram your content with keywords unnecessarily. And as such, this tool solves that problem perfectly. It allows you to analyze a whole web page using its URL. Or even a piece of text by copying and pasting.
Related Topic: Keyword Tool | #1 free Google Keyword Planner alternative
The simplest method of calculating keyword density is usually to divide the number of times a particular keyword is mentioned in a text by the total number of words in the text. And then multiply the result by one hundred to get your percentage.
But, the Keyword Density Checker Tool does more than calculating your keyword density. It actually checks for and analyzes ALL the top keywords used on the page or text that is being analyzed. And then, it shows you the following metrics for better SEO performance and effective content optimization.
What you’ll get from this tool:
- The total number of keywords on that page.
- All the page load times, if you’re analyzing a URL.
- A tag cloud, detailing all the keywords used on the analyzed page or text.
- Top keywords used within the content and their frequency counts.
- Every indicator showing whether or not the keywords have a title, description, or <H*>.
- The keyword density for each keyword or phrase used within the examined content
- including their frequency of usage and percentage of usage.
- These calculations are broken down over descending tilts of:
- one-word keywords,
- two-word keywords,
- three-word keywords, and
- four-word keywords.
This sort of sophisticated analysis allows you to easily define and become acquainted with the proportion and sum of keywords used within your content.
How to Use the Keyword Density Checker Tool
Using the free online keyword density calculator is as simple as just clicking two buttons in two simple steps:
Step #1:
On this page (https://smallseotools.com/keyword-density-checker), enter the URL of the page you want to analyze. Or, select “TEXT” to paste your content if the piece is not yet published online.
Step #2:
Click on “Check” to run your request.
Once you’ve done that, the keyword density analyzer will immediately retrieve all the keyword data from your website or piece of content and display them in a tabular format. And don’t forget, you can use this tool to analyze not just your own web pages, but that of your competition also to get an idea of what they are doing.
After running a keyword density check, you may find that the percentage of times your target keywords appear is either too low or too high. In that case, I recommend you revise the content.
Perse, Keyword Density is a fundamental part of search engine optimization, thus it is important to understand how it works. First, many people often ask the question:
1. Does keyword density affect ranking?
Well, there’s no official statement from Google or any other major search engine expressly stating that keyword density does affect ranking. But without a web page containing a given keyword, there’s absolutely no way the search engines will rank such a page for the keyword even if that might be its target keyword.
In other words, *keywords* are important for a page to show up in search engine results pages (SERPs). And where there are keywords, keyword density must naturally be present. So, the germane question to ask could be:
2. What is the best keyword density for better ranking?
Again, there is no exact or ideal percentage of keywords for better ranking.
Instead, experts (and Google) suggest writing your content in a natural language; that is, without any intensive cramming of keywords. Hence, applying your keywords in a natural, contextual sense along with relevant long-tail keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords works best.
After creating your content using natural language, you can then use Keyword Density Checker to analyze it to be sure it is not overly stuffed with keywords.
3. How do search engines view keyword stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is considered to be a spammy practice and a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines, and in response to such actions, the search engine essentially lowers the rankings of the sites that break the rules.
Fortunately, the Free Keyword Density Checker can be useful in showing you whether or not your content is stuffed with keywords. Typically, you can evaluate this by looking at the percentage of keyword usage under the “Keyword Density” table.
Learn More: How to do proper keyword optimization
Feeling particularly worried that some keywords have been mentioned too many times already? Well, you can use this free keyword density analyzer to your advantage. In order to see how many times they appeared and reduce it the best way you can.
An effective solution is to mention your target keywords naturally. Especially in the on-page body of your text. And then add the same in the meta title, description, H1, and possibly the URL. Furthermore, this tool does analyze text found in the on-page body of the content. Along with content within heading tags.
Final Words,
In nutshell, according to the Key Google Guidelines, the definition of Keyword Stuffing summarizes it all. Whereby, in simple terms, it’s the practice of excessively filling a web page with keywords. With the ultimate goal of gaming the search giant’s ranking system.
Additionally, a similar guideline on keyword stuffing is also provided by Bing. Back in the day, this practice was actually a rather successful way of boosting a web page’s search visibility. However, search engines eventually have become smarter and smarter each day.
Related Topic: What does Keyword Difficulty mean? How to Rank in SERP
And as a result, they started issuing Keyword Stuffing penalties – as can be seen from the above guideline. When optimizing web pages for search engines like Google, you may want to take the easy way out. By using various manipulation tactics to quickly get higher rankings.
Finally, I hope the above-revised guide on how to use the Keyword Density Checker Tool is useful. But, if you’ll need more support, you can Contact Us and let us know how we can help you. You can also share some of your additional thoughts, contributions, suggestions, and questions in our comments section below.
