The keyword density number you're chasing

The keyword density number you're chasing

"Aim for 1-2% keyword density."

There is no such target. There never was.

That study you keep quoting traces back to a 2000s-era Yoast traffic-light and a misread of TF-IDF. No leaked ranking system, no Google patent, no documentation specifies a density percentage. You're optimizing toward a number someone invented to make a plugin feel scientific.

Here's the failure mode it actually causes: writers pad copy to hit a percentage, producing the exact awkward repetition that pattern-matches as low-quality. Or they delete natural mentions to get under a ceiling, stripping the page of clarity.

Fix: write for a human, then check you've covered the entities and subtopics the top results cover — coverage, not frequency. The word should appear because the sentence needs it, not because a meter is yellow. (If you can't say your topic once naturally, density is not your problem.)