SEO Content Score | Links to Wild

Target keyword

Content type

Working title

Your domain Used only to tell an internal link from an external one.

Your draft

<h1>How I Evaluate a Backlink Before I Build It</h1>
<p>Backlink evaluation is the part of the job nobody watches. Before a single email goes out, every prospect goes through four gates, and most of them do not make it past the second.</p>
<h2>Gate one: is anyone actually there</h2>
<p>A site with authority metrics and no traffic is a site that sells links. Check the organic traffic trend first, because it is the hardest number to fake and the fastest one to read.</p>
<h2>Gate two: relevance, and what it really means</h2>
<p>Relevance is not about the industry on the homepage. It is about whether the page the link sits on is about the thing the link points at. A gardening blog linking to a payroll tool is noise whatever its metrics say.</p>
<p>See the <a href="https://example.com/services/link-building">link building service</a> for how this runs in practice, and the <a href="https://ahrefs.com/blog">research on link decay</a> for why placement outlives metrics.</p>
<h2>Gate three: the placement</h2>
<p>A link in the body of a page that people read is worth more than ten in a footer. Ask where it goes before you ask what it costs.</p>
<img src="/assets/gates.png" alt="The four gates in order">

HTML, Markdown or plain text. HTML gets the most out of it — headings, links and images are read from the markup.

0

out of 100

This number is this tool's opinion of on-page fundamentals. It is not a Google score, Google does not compute anything like it, and no score here outranks a better page with more links pointing at it.

Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.

What this measures, and what it cannot

Everything scored here is mechanical: where a phrase appears, how long the sentences are, whether the headings nest properly, how many links leave the page. Those are the things a machine can check and a writer can forget. None of them is what makes a page rank.

What actually decides a ranking is whether the page answers the query better than the ones above it, and whether enough other sites think it is worth pointing at. A tool cannot assess the first and has no visibility into the second. So treat this as a pre-flight check — the list you run before publishing to catch the obvious misses — and not as a target to optimise towards. A draft scoring 95 that says nothing new will lose to a 70 that does.

On keyword density

Density is scored here in a band rather than at a target, and the band is wide on purpose. There is no optimal percentage. Density matters at the extremes only: at zero the page is about something else, and above roughly three per cent it reads like it was written for a crawler, which costs you the reader whether or not it costs you the ranking. Everything in between is noise. If the band is the only component you are failing, write the sentence the way you would say it and move on.

The components that are worth the most

The keyword in the first hundred words. Not for the algorithm — for the reader who arrived from a search and needs to see, immediately, that this page is about the thing they typed. A page that takes four paragraphs to get to the point loses them before it can rank.
Depth against the content type. A 300-word answer to a question that needs 1,500 will not compete, and a 3,000-word product page is padding. The target here is a starting point; what matters is covering the question completely, which is usually longer than the first draft and shorter than the word count everybody quotes.
Heading structure. One H1, H2s for the real sections, H3s only under an H2. Skipped levels break the outline for screen readers and make the page harder to feature as a snippet.
Internal links. The most under-used on-page lever there is. A new page with three internal links from relevant existing pages gets found, crawled and understood far faster than one linked only from the blog index.

Readability

The readability component uses Flesch reading ease, which counts syllables per word and words per sentence. It is a crude instrument — it cannot tell clear writing from nonsense, and technical vocabulary drags the score down whether or not the audience knows the words. Use it as a check for one thing: sentences that have grown past the point where anyone can follow them. If you write for specialists, a lower score is fine and a lower score is expected.

Questions people ask

Is this the score Google uses?

No. Google does not publish a content score and does not compute anything of this shape. This is a checklist of on-page fundamentals with weights this tool assigns, and the weights are a judgement call. The number is useful as a before-and-after on your own drafts and meaningless as a comparison against anything else.

What keyword density should I aim for?

None in particular. Anywhere between roughly half a per cent and three per cent is fine, and the exact figure inside that band does not matter. What matters is that the phrase appears naturally where a reader would expect it — the title, the opening, a subheading — and not thirty times in a row.

Does word count affect rankings?

Not directly. Longer pages correlate with better rankings mostly because thorough answers tend to be longer, not because length is rewarded. The target here is a sanity check against the content type: if your draft is a third of it, you have probably not finished the topic.

Can I paste Markdown instead of HTML?

Yes. Markdown headings, links and images are read the same way as HTML ones. Plain text works too, but the link and image components cannot be measured from it, so they are left out of the total rather than counted as zero.

Is my draft uploaded anywhere?

No. The whole analysis runs in your browser and nothing leaves the page. Unpublished drafts and client work are safe to paste here.

Related tools

A perfect draft still needs links

On-page work makes a page worth ranking. Links are what get it ranked. If the score is high and the page is not moving, that is the gap.

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