🔍 SEO Tools

SEO tooling attracts more folklore than most areas of web development, so it is worth being clear about which of these numbers actually influence anything and which are merely diagnostic.

Things that are not ranking factors

Meta keywords. Google has ignored the tag since 2009. Word count. Confirmed repeatedly as not a ranking factor; the correlation between long articles and good rankings reflects that thorough coverage needs more words, not that length helps. Keyword density. There is no target figure, and optimising toward one produces the repetitive writing that quality systems discount. Meta description. Not a ranking factor, and Google rewrites it for most queries anyway — though a good one still earns clicks.

Use the density and readability checkers to catch accidental over-repetition and needlessly complex sentences, not to hit a number.

Things that genuinely matter

Being crawlable and indexable. The most consequential misconception in this whole area is that robots.txt hides pages. It asks crawlers not to fetch a URL; it does not keep that URL out of the index, and a disallowed page can still be listed from inbound links. To keep a page out of results you need a noindex tag on a page that remains crawlable.

Canonical accuracy. If the same content is reachable at several URLs, a canonical tag consolidates the signals onto one. A canonical pointing at the wrong host is worse than none at all.

Structure. Sequential headings give both readers and assistive technology a usable outline, and they often supply the text Google uses for jump links.

Honest structured data. Markup must describe content the user can actually see. Marking up reviews or prices that do not appear on the page is a policy violation that can cost you every rich result.