keywords - how many is enough?

Hi John.

The question you asked will return different answers because everyone usually does things a bit differently than the other. Some people target only ONE kw phrase per article while others may target up to THREE! For me, if it is an article on my home page or another important page I may target up to three keywords. If the page in question is just another article page on my site then I may go for ONE kw phrase per article.

As for where to put the kws...

It is usually a good idea to get your kw phrase at the top of your article. I would say get it in either the first or second sentence. Then space it out a few times in the article. Try to write the article in a natural way as if you were not trying to cram your kws and phrases in the article.

KW density will be debated as well. I personally no longer check kw density and just try to write naturally(of course making sure to get my kw phrase in the article at the top, a couple of times in body and again in the closing somewhere or toward bottom of article).

Also, make sure your kw phrase is in your title of the article. Hope this helps some.

Larry, thanks for that.

Its so confusing BECAUSE everyone has their own opinion.

I find that its difficult to know whether your choice of keywords is at fault or whether you're simply not using them correctly.

Each page of your website you should be optimizes for a few keywords.
Then each inside page of the site you can optimize for other keywords.
500 sounds like quite a lot.
Start off little by little is what i recommend.
Hope this helps.

John,

Learn to categorize your site first, this will help you in grouping your keywords. It makes the most sense out of anything Ive done, and it certainly makes the site, and backlinking much, much easier.

Take a look at the attached spreadsheet. This reflects the work I put into my website sales contract site in my signature. As you can see, I went about doing keyword research, then breaking it into set categories.

The advice that Larry gave you is sound.

I feel the trick is to write naturally for humans, whilst being mindful of keyword usage and placement within your articles.

Remember to always use your keywords in the title and description tags, as well as within your onsite navigation.

At the end of the day, you will get hundreds of varying opinions about what works best. However I can tell you that it comes down to your ability to use some good judgement, some common sense, implementation, and testing and finally, results that guide you towards what you feel works best for you.

Any more questions feel free to ask. Ive probably gone off on a tangent so I do apologise.

I usually go after 2 at a time per page. I like to get my keyword density between 2-3% when SEOing a page, and I find that doing this with any more than 2 keywords starts to make the page look a bit spammy.

Also to properly SEO a page, you should have your keywords in the title, url etc etc, so again any more than 2 keywords starts making life tricky.

I'll confuse you a little more with my own 2 cents on the subject . Rule of thumb I follow is that the minimum is for your keyword to appear at least three times in the article, once in the first or second sentence, once in the last or second to last and once somewhere in the middle. Beyond that, just write a good article which stays on topic and I find that the keyword often jut gets worked into the content naturally anyway.

I usually only do 1 or 2 per keyword. If there are 2 you can use together, it's obvious.

For example, Hot Water Heaters and Buy Hot Water Heaters could be put on the same page, and both be ranked for their respected keywords.

You wouldn't want to group Buy Hot Water Heaters with Purchase Hot Water Heaters though...for that, you could do a seperate page. Just remember to keep the content on each page completely seperate, and never use the same article on more than one page on your site.

Have you heard of the SEO Pressor plugin? It's a plugin that will give you a score based on your keyword density and on all the on-page factors needed to rank for a specific keyword.

As mentioned above, it really does depend on personal preference, but I generally aim for 2 or 3 per page.

My reasons are as follows:

I want to use my keywords in the page title and still keep within the 60 characters that google will actually show, 3 is about the limit for this to be feasable most times.

I want a varied link profile. If I target 1 keyword I will probably end up only building links with that as text. If I target 3 my link profile will come up looking more natural.

Just my own preference. I've heard of people targetting as many as 6 to a page and also of people who only target 1.

more than 3 is good enough

Guys, thanks for all the great advice, and for your time too.

My question was on the back of my changing my three post site, with one keyword per post, into a four post site and trying to rank for three keywords for each post. I'd not managed to get my 'extra' keywords ranked much beyond #400 and couldn't understand the reasons.

On further analysis I realised that I'd skewed some calculations which has made me choose not nearly long tailed enough keywords.

I've spent my day lengthening the tail on my extra 11 keywords.

Thanks for all your comments, they've really helped.

Hi John,

Keyword density is a myth - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-opin...ealities-fight
Place your keyword right at the beginning of the title. If you can repeat it twice in the title - do so. place it also in the first sentence and then around two more times somewhere throughout the article. Some say it should be placed in the last paragraph, but I don't really think anyone can measure if it really matters.

Rank each page for one keyword only.

Hope it helps

John:

Lots of good pointers here, and I want to agree with the vast majority here that although it is, of course, necessary for you to get your keyword(s) on your phrase, density is not something that I tremendously worry about. More often than not, I'm watching my density making sure that I do not go too high.

For example, there's a rather popular Wordpress plugin that counts your keyword density and doesn't turn red until you top 6%. Anything over 4% IMHO is dangerously high. If you have ever written content, trying to work a 4%+ keyword density into an article is quite hard, and you have to get inventive to really do it without spamming. Common sense dictates that not all high PR sites/articles stuff their keywords that hard. In fact, many are simply writing naturally.

For my sites, I usually try to get the keyword phrase in the first and last sentence, and then use it sparingly in <h1>, <h2>, and if possible an <h3> tag. This along with 1-2 other mentions in your normal 500-1000 word article should be fine.

Again, there are varying schools of thought on this, but I have found that this works just fine for my sites. I personally copy write about half of the content that goes on my sites (running 100+ at the moment), and haven't had any problems with this method.

Usually, I will research my niche, and then organize my keyword phrases into close matches. Those match groups then become my pages for my site, and I built the site from there. A couple of pages added per week is enough to keep the spiders coming.

Hope this helped.

You keyword density is not more then the 3%....on your website post or content.

You can always check with EzineArticles,. I think they require <5% Keyword Density

3% to 4% has been optimum for me.