How many keywords to rank for

Do you mean per page or per site?

Per Site - Its really endless, for a site I am serious enough I will typically target tens of thousands of keywords, across thousands of pages of content. Depends on the size of the niche, but typically I pick bigger niches which give me plenty of room to grow.

Per Page - Well this is largely down to your page title, and Google mainly pays attention to the words at the beginning of your title, and pays less attention to the words towards the end. So if you had a page title that was 14 words long then the first 3ish would be the main keyword Google would pay attention too and those towards the end would be considered less important.

Per page, you may target as little as one word, or have a title that is longer (I'd say 16 absolute max, but 8 words is optimum - look for how many characters Google shows in its results pages as a guide. Potentially, the longer your title, the more it dilutes the importance of any one keyword in the title.

I tend to go after the longtail so will average 8 words in my title, and that allows me to target various combinations of keyword phrases, while also focusing on the keyword phrase at the start of the title. Here's an example. 'Effect of Website Speed on Users | Statistics Reveal Slow Loading Times Cost Sites Serious Money' - this page got found in Google and then picked up by a major blog.

Typically a single page could potentially end up ranking for 50+ keyword combinations. They are longtail so often won't send much traffic on there own, but it soon adds up, and pretty often some of them can be higher traffic. Longtail (3 or more words in a phrase) accounts for 95%+ of my traffic, and its in the tens of thousands daily from Google.

Obviously on a per page or per site basis you still need the backlinks to back it up so the pages can actually rank.

I'd say however many you can fit - but on average maybe 5-10 per page to start out with, emphasizing ones in the page title of course. Maybe try doing just a few keywords on your first try - it is easier to monitor - but don't forget to quickly start ramping up that number so you can get more backlinks!

I'll go against the crowd.

Try going for one. A simple one.

Set yourself up for success and set a goal you can achieve. No, you probably wont make much if any money but you'll learn.

If you're having trouble, you know you're doing something wrong. If not, you're on the right track.

Once you've successfully ranked for an easy keyword then take your game up a notch.

Since you're new in this business you should only go for one or two max. Reason why is if you go for more you might just get confused, and until you know what you're doing just go for one or two.

I'd strongly not recommend keeping it small and going for one or two keywords, makes absolutely no sense.

The biggest mistakes new people make is they can't judge competition very well, and how much effort it requires for a given level of competition.

Often they will pick a keyword that has very little traffic because they don't understand what the stats from Google keyword tools are actually saying and have no real life basis to compare it to, the keywords are too competitive and they don't yet have the skillset to rank for them, nor the time and resources, and finally those keywords can be very poor at converting.

If you try to build more sites/pages and target more keywords, you will learn a lot quicker what is working and what is not, as you will have performed many experiments and seen real results, and it will help show you where to focus your efforts more if certain keywords start performing.

If you invest in just one or two keywords and try to keep pushing them, you could be hitting keywords that are no good for you, and will fail to have seen other opportunities.

Also targeting 1-2 keywords is crazy for a beginner, they tend to be A LOT more competitive. If you target more keywords per page - i.e longtail phrases, your chance of ranking and getting traffic is way higher, and needs less work.

just do some keyword analysis with google keyword tool. check out the competition for ur keywrd. start with less competitive keyword as you are starter.

Most webmasters try to rank the home page of their website for blow 10 keywords and they it by getting backlinks for it from quality websites. And as i know usually internal pages are optimizing for one or two keywords because ranking an inner page for more than two words is difficult.