SEOOn-Page SEOUpdated 2026.04.28

Keyword Density

Also known as키워드 밀도Keyword Frequency

In one line

Keyword density is the ratio of target-keyword occurrences to total words on a page — once a headline SEO signal, today only a minor secondary one.

Going deeper

Keyword density is a plain ratio — keyword count divided by total word count. In early-2000s SEO, hitting a target range was a core task, but as engines moved to semantic understanding the standalone signal has lost almost all of its weight.

It is not completely useless. If the keyword never appears at all the page topic gets ambiguous, so density survives as a sanity check — 'does the term show up naturally and often enough'. Stuffing it in to hit a percentage, on the other hand, is a clear negative signal these days.

In AI search, semantic consistency matters far more than density. LLMs reward pages where synonyms and related concepts blend naturally into the prose, not pages that hammer the same exact phrase over and over.

Related terms

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