Keyword Density Is Not Dead. You're Just Measuring It Wrong.

Every few months someone publishes an article declaring keyword density irrelevant. And every few months, I watch a site lose rankings because the writer stuffed a target phrase into every other sentence. The metric is not dead. The way most people use it is just wrong. What keyword density actually measures Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears relative to the total word count. If your article is 1,000 words and your target phrase appears 15 times, the density is 1.5%. The formula: density = (keyword occurrences / total words) * 100 That is the entire calculation. Where people go wrong is treating the result as a target rather than a diagnostic signal. The 2-3% myth For years, SEO guides recommended keeping keyword density between 2% and 3%. This was never based on any published search engine specification. It came from reverse-engineering top-ranking pages circa 2010 and averaging their keyword frequencies. The web was a different place then. Pages we