Exact Match Density in Top 30KB

Abstract illustration of exact-phrase matches measured within the highlighted top portion of a document plus image alt text, in RankGear indigo and coral.

Exact Match Density in Top 30KB estimates how often the exact search query appears near the start of a page. RankGear counts exact-phrase matches inside a compatibility copy of the first 30,000 UTF-16 units of the source (with image alt text appended) and returns that count as a percentage of the page’s words. It is a proportion observed within a measured result set, not a quota to hit.

Factor IDRG-KWD-006
FamilyKeyword Usage & Density
MeasurementPercentage
Measured zoneGoogle-density top-30KB corpus plus image alt text

What it measures

This factor estimates exact-query density within RankGear’s compatibility representation of the first 30,000 UTF-16 units of the page. Rather than scanning the whole document, it looks at the opening span of source that a search engine would weigh most heavily, then reports how densely the exact query phrase occurs there.

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How RankGear measures it

RankGear first collects the alt text from the full HTML. It strips selected noncontent elements, truncates the remaining source to 30,000 UTF-16 units, and appends the collected alt text to that truncated span. It then counts exact-phrase matches of the query across this corpus, divides by its word-pattern count, and multiplies by 100. A page whose word count resolves to zero returns 0.

density = (exact_phrase_matches / word_pattern_count) × 100
corpus  = strip_noncontent(html)[:30000 UTF-16 units] + collected_alt_text
if word_pattern_count == 0: density = 0
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How to optimize it

State the exact topic naturally in prominent early content, and use accurate image alt text where the image genuinely represents the subject. Treat this value as an observation of how plainly the page opens on its topic, not a percentage to engineer toward — repeating the phrase to move the number degrades the copy without earning the position.

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Important considerations

  • The corpus is not simply the first 30KB of visible prose — it is a stripped, truncated compatibility representation of the source.
  • Some markup tokens survive the stripping step and can affect the word count, and therefore the resulting percentage.
  • Alt text collected from beyond the truncation point is still appended to the corpus, so images late in the page can contribute.
  • Do not force exact phrases into alt text or opening copy to inflate the figure.
  • This is a density proportion that relates to position within a measured result set — it does not on its own cause or guarantee a ranking.
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Related factors

Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.

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