If you want to promote your website you have to make sure that search engines can find it. The best way to do that is to make sure that your page contains quality content. Most search engines have a variety of ways to rank internet pages. One of the criteria to rank a pages is the use of keywords. Having the right keywords in your page helps the search engines to direct people to your site. Here is a tool to count keywords in any website (more explanation below the tool).
Keyword count (>= 2) for: http://www.minkukel.com/index.htmb binary books california canyon clock colors copyright counter database dutch everybody grand keyword metric minkukel movies music person scrambler search sillyclocks software toonder unique web webkukel website word words © |
The content of a website is made up many words. Some of these words are very general and could be found in any text, but some words are directly related to the main topics of the page. These are the keywords that people use when searching for information. In a website about cars we can expect keywords like "car", "cars", "model", "engine", "horsepower" and "airbag", but in a page about earthworms these car specific keywords will probably not appear at all.
I like to study other internet pages to see if they use keywords that could be useful for my own websites. Reading all these websites is a lot of work, so I decided that I need a tool that can find keywords and tells me the frequency (i.e. the importance) of the keyword on a web page.
First I searched a bit on the web and found several applications that can do this, and several companies offer paid services of search engine optimization (SEO) which in most cases includes counting keywords. But I wanted something free and simple, and in the end I decided to make my own page with a script to count keywords. I didn't start from scratch but used a few PHP scripts written by others to develop my own keyword counter. The idea is simple: in a form you enter the URL of a website, the script reads the page, extracts all the words, and then makes a frequency count of (almost) all the words that appear on that page. Of course some very common words, such as "about", "the", "if", "with" "a", "in", "to", and "and" are useless as keywords and should be ignored.
To make the tool a bit more flexible for the user I also included an option to filter out words that appear only few times. For example if you set the value of that "minimum count" to 3, the script will only show words that appear at least 3 times in the web page. If you set 1 as minimum value, the script will show all words (except the very common words which are simply ignored). For pages with a lot of text it is advisable to set a higher "minimum count" to avoid seeing hundreds of unimportant words.
Instead of showing a frequency table for all the words, the results are presented as an alphabetical list where the more frequent keywords are shown in a bigger font size. This gives quite a nice visual picture of the keyword results. You can hover over a word with your mouse pointer to see the actual frequency count of that word.
How to use this script? Just type the URL of the website you want to analyze in the box below. Type the full name, including the http:// at the beginning. The easiest way is to search or surf to the page you are interested in and copy the URL in the box below. Then select a minimum count, and finally hit the "count keywords" button. Then wait a bit, because depending on the size of the page the script needs more or less time to read the web page. The default value is the home page of "http://www.minkukel.com".
Oh ... and if you enter a non existing web site you will get some warning message from the PHP script. Don't worry, just fix the URL and try again.
Keywords that are ignored by the script
Here is an alphabetical list of all the common English words that are ignored by the script:
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, a, about, after, again, all, almost, along, also, am, amp, an, and, another, any, are, area, around, as, at, available, back, be, because, been, before, being, best, better, big, bit, both, but, by, c, came, can, capable, come, control, could, course, d, dan, day, decided, did, didn, different, div, do, doesn, don, down, drive, e, each, easily, easy, edition, end, enough, even, every, example, few, find, first, for, found, from, get, go, going, good, got, gt, had, hard, has, have, he, her, here, him, his, how, i, if, in, into, is, isn, it, its, just, know, last, left, li, like, little, ll, long, look, lot, lt, m, made, make, many, mb, me, menu, might, mm, more, most, mr, mrs, much, my, name, nbsp, need, new, no, not, now, number, of, off, old, on, one, only, or, original, other, our, out, over, own, part, place, point, pretty, probably, problem, put, quite, quot, r, re, really, results, right, s, said, same, saw, see, set, several, she, should, since, size, small, so, some, something, special, still, stuff, such, sure, system, t, take, than, that, the, their, them, then, there, these, they, thing, things, think, this, those, though, through, time, to, today, together, too, took, two, until, up, upon, us, use, used, using, ve, very, want, was, way, we, well, went, were, what, when, where, which, while, white, who, will, with, would, you, your
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I hope you like my little tool and perhaps you can now start your own search engine optimization (SEO). Run the tool first on your own page and look at the density of your most important keywords. Then use a search engine, for example Google, and search pages using your own keywords. If you are lucky your own page will show up, but more likely you will find similar pages that have a higher page ranking. Copy the URL of these pages and run them in the keyword counter tool. Now you will view which keywords are important (most frequent) in these competing pages. If your page did not include these keywords, perhaps you should consider including them, but of course only if they are relevant to your text. If your page did include the keywords already you should consider increasing their weight by using the a bit more often.