Definition
Keyword density is the proportion of a page's words that are a given keyword or phrase, expressed as a percentage. Russian-language SEO tools report a related metric they call "тошнота" ("nausea") — a measure of how repetitive and keyword-saturated the text is, with a classic and academic variant.
Both are heuristics for spotting text that has been over-optimised to the point of reading unnaturally.
There is no target keyword density that improves rankings. Modern search engines understand language well enough that repeating a phrase a certain number of times does nothing useful, and text that is visibly stuffed — the same keyword forced into most sentences, unnatural phrasings to fit an exact-match term, keyword lists disguised as prose — is a recognised spam signal that can hurt rather than help.
The only useful role of a density or nausea check is as a warning that a draft has drifted into stuffing.
In context
On iGaming affiliate sites, keyword stuffing tends to appear in templated pages generated at scale: an operator page that works the phrase "BrandX Casino" into the title, every heading, the first sentence of every paragraph and the alt text of every image reads as machine-optimised, not written for a person. The same happens with commercial phrases like "best online casino bonus" repeated far past the point of natural usage.
The productive approach is to write for the reader and cover the topic thoroughly, then use a density or nausea check only to catch accidental over-repetition — a section that says "payout" fifteen times where a pronoun or a synonym would read better. Genuine topical coverage naturally includes related terms and concepts (which older SEO called LSI); it does not require hitting a repetition count for the head keyword.
If a page reads naturally to a person and answers the query completely, its keyword statistics are almost always fine.
Worked example
An affiliate audits a batch of templated operator pages and finds the target brand phrase appears in every heading and most sentences — a nausea score well into the warning range. The editor rewrites them to use the brand name naturally, replacing forced repetitions with pronouns and varied phrasing.
The pages read better, and the ones that had been suppressed start ranking.
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