Keyword Density and Word Count: Finding the Right Balance

Search engines need sufficient text to understand page topics. Too little content and they can’t determine relevance. Keywords must appear often enough to signal topicality without crossing into spammy repetition.

Minimum Content Length

Target at least 600 words on core pages. Pages with fewer words struggle to demonstrate depth and may be classified as thin content. SEO tools flag pages under this threshold for good reason.

The 600-word minimum isn’t arbitrary. It provides enough space to cover a topic meaningfully while including keywords naturally throughout. Longer content (800+ words) often performs better on competitive terms, partly because it tends to attract more backlinks.

Target Keyword Density

Aim for roughly 3% density on your primary keyword. In a 600-word article, that means the keyword appears about 18 times. Analysis of top-ranking pages shows competitive densities ranging from 2.6% to 4.1%, with 3-5% being a solid target zone.

Density too low fails to communicate relevance. Density too high looks like keyword stuffing and triggers penalties. Natural writing tends to fall in the right range without forcing.

The Noise Word Problem

Tool pages and landing pages often contain repeated interface text: buttons saying “Download” or “Play” or “Apply Configuration” dozens of times. When these functional words appear more frequently than your target keyword, they dilute your topical signal.

Search engines calculate what your page is “about” based on word frequency. If “Download” appears 50 times and your keyword appears 15 times, the page might look like it’s about downloading rather than your actual topic.

CSS Content Technique

Remove noise words from HTML while keeping them visible to users. Instead of putting button text in HTML, inject it via CSS pseudo-elements. Crawlers typically ignore content generated through CSS.

Use the ::after selector with the content property to display button labels. The text appears for users but doesn’t enter the word frequency calculations that crawlers use. This maintains clean keyword density on pages with heavy UI repetition.

For multilingual sites, CSS custom properties can inject translated button text while keeping the HTML node-free of these non-semantic strings.