Word frequency counter

A word frequency count shows which words appear most often in a text. Writers use it to find repetitive words, SEO editors to check that a page is about what it should be about, students to analyse speeches and literature, and analysts to get a first look at survey answers or customer reviews.

How to use it

1. Paste the text.
2. Choose options such as ignoring case or excluding common stop words if available.
3. Review the list of words with their counts and percentages.

Example

For the text The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog sleeps. (12 words), the top results are:

• the: 3 (25%)
• dog: 2 (16.7%)
• quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, lazy, sleeps: 1 each (8.3%)

Stop words

In almost any English text the most frequent words are the, of, and, to and a. They say little about content, so analyses often exclude them to reveal meaningful topic words.

Using it for writing

• Spot crutch words such as very, really, just and actually.
• Check that you vary vocabulary in long documents.

Using it for SEO

Check that the main topic and related terms appear naturally. There is no ideal keyword density; search engines penalise keyword stuffing, so write for readers and use frequency counts only as a sanity check.

Notes

• Words are separated by spaces and punctuation, so don't and dont may count separately.
• Different forms (run, runs, running) are counted separately unless stemmed.