Term Frequency

What is Term Frequency?

Term Frequency (TF) counts how many times a term appears in a document. In ranking, higher frequency usually signals higher importance—but it’s normalized to avoid bias toward long documents.

How It Works (quick)

• Count terms: Raw term counts per document.
• Normalize: Divide by document length to avoid bias.
• Weight: Used in formulas like TF-IDF or BM25.
• Impact: More occurrences → higher relevance, up to a saturation point.

Why It Matters in E-commerce

• Ranking: Queries like “leather boots” rank documents with higher occurrences of those words.
• SEO: Helps understand keyword density in product descriptions.

Best Practices

• Avoid keyword stuffing; focus on natural usage.
• Use unique attributes to boost relevance (brand, model).
• Pair with semantic methods for meaning beyond raw counts.

Summary

Term frequency is a basic relevance signal. It works best when combined with normalization and other ranking factors.