What is a Keyword Analyzer?

A keyword analyzer usually refers to software that was specifically programmed to aid in the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). People such as web developers, Internet marketers and Internet journalists often need to discover and study top keywords directly related to their product or service. SEO involves preparing a web page or an entire web site to be highly visible to search engines that behave like robots that "crawl" the Internet and index the sites they find. When someone performs a search for information, he or she usually begins by typing in keywords or key phrases relating to the subject. If the search was successful, a list of results is returned that displays, in order of relevancy.

Many web sites, particularly those that are e-commerce enabled, were designed to generate profits or to raise funds for nonprofit organizations. Much of their success depends on how high they appear in the list of results that a search engine returns to someone who might be interested in a particular product or service. Depending on the topic of the site, it can be very difficult for a web developer or web master to choose top keywords. This is when a keyword analyzer can serve as a keyword suggestion tool. Once the suggestions are listed, web content providers can write material into which the phrases are incorporated as naturally as possible.

The keyword analyzer can then be utilized to check the keyword density of each page of each site before publishing. Keyword density basically refers to the number of times target keywords and phrases appear throughout a web document. SEO of web documents requires the inclusion of top keywords into its various elements that are highly visible to search engines. Such elements include Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language ((X)HTML) tags needed to form the different parts of a web document. Those parts include meta data, the title, headings, paragraphs and even hyper links.

Although the use of top keywords is vital for web pages to appear near the top of result lists produced by search engines, care must be taken not to overdo it. An efficient keyword analyzer has the capability of detecting overuse of keywords by checking the keyword density of documents. If there is excessive use of keywords, the search engine robots could view the pages as spam and deny priority placement in search lists. This form of penalization could cause great loss in the number of visitors that a web site receives.