How many keywords should be ranked for the homepage?

I have 30 keywords that I target (though not all to the same degree) for my home page and it hasn't done me any harm. Why should it? Google doesn't look at the keyword meta tag any more.
The site was launched last May and I have seven words on page 1 (4 high competition, 1 medium, 2 low), ten on page 2 and five on page 3. The remaining eight are between 36 - 92.

To me that is an ambitous number... I generally focus on 4 keywords and that is hard enough work!

Seems a bit ambitious to me as well. Make sure to optimize internal pages as well to maintain a good balance. If all you're doing is building links to the mainpage and not focusing on the internal pages that can look a little weird to Goog and may cause an issue.

Seems like far too many.

Might have less chance of penalisation actually, because you anchor text will be so varied. Won't be as effective though but could be a good test!

I think 50 keywords is a large number for me, because it is very hard to maintain 50 keywords at a time. I like to work with 5 to 7 keywords for each my site.

I usually aim for 2 and 3 that I really try to rank for. The rest kind take care of themselves because you would be amazed at the long tail keywords you rank for without even trying. Just check out your Google analytics stats and see where your traffic is coming from. It's truly amazing some of the keywords people find your site with.

It's quite funny to look at some of the searches leading to your site as well.

I think somewhere around 10 is a good number. SEO is a long and arduous process, so having 50 keywords to target just makes your task that much more difficult.

Yea 5-10 I would say

i usually only focus on 2 to 3 keywords for my homepage

I usually go for 2-3 home keywords and 1 keyword per post/page

That is not a ridiculous number. Like Mike has said, you can even target 100 keywords in the same web page. By proper competition monitoring and implementing a good keyword targeting, you can make those keywords ranked pretty well.

In my opinion 50 keywords in a page is a large number because it is very hard to maintain 50 keywords at a time. you should only look to target 3 or 4 primary keywords.

50 Keywords List seems very Difficult To Rank! How can You rank all of Them at a Time Although Some of Them are High Density keywords while some of them are low density keywords but it is very difficult task to sustain the rankings of Home Page Keywords! Try To Rank 3 to 5 keywords for homepage!

As per me what you suggested was right as target such pages with keywords that on which pages of your site has meaningful and unique content and then only one can get more results. So find out some examples of losing results with targeting just one page and then insist them for not to do this.
And though they do not be agree then use the unique and meaningful content for the home page and not whole information but just provide little on home page and then link it to other pages. So this way your client can get better results for their site.

I would not focus on too many keywords to target for my site. Maybe around 3 to 5 keywords will do to help you focused in ranking them.

50 seems to be too many to target for home page. How will he adjust the content for 50 keywords on a single page? As an expert don't always listen to clients. Ultimately you are an expert not he or she is. Educate him the pros and cons. Targetting 50 keywords on a single page can get the page penalized as well. If you get links for only his home page not for any other page then it will look more like spamming besides in any unfortunate case if his home page gets penalized ( I pray, it does not happen) he will suffering ranking loss on all 50 keywords. Tell your client that Panda takes into account the overall strength of a site and if a site's one page is very powerful but no links to other pages it will not reflect good on it. Spreading the keywords on on several pages will help.

I think its too much.. 3 to 4 are enough.

3-5 is best, 10 is pushing it. But 50? Wow haha thats overdoing it by a lot.

I think 5-10 is a good number. Please ask your client not to do 50 keywords for one web page. 50 is too high....

50 keywords is too much.

1-5 is very good.

Sometimes there are long tail keywords which can be easily targeted with the main keywords. But targeting 50 keywords on homepage is somewhat difficult and would be time consuming as well. You must convince your client to create sub-pages to target the number of keywords.

first i don't think goggle can penalize for that but if your website is not so popular than i think its too much to target and rank. I seen so many sites ranking on their home page for number of keywords but at initial basis i think target 50 keywords would dilute your focus

Why not rank the homepage for 50 KW's? Just explain to the client that it will be more work and take longer than building or targeting other pages for some of them.

Its not harmful, but this will take a lot of time and effort...

My limit is only 8.. but doing more, I asked for extra charges also You don't have to rank as many keywords that you can. Just select the best ones that can bring in more traffic to the site.

Ditto DeskCoder and MikeFriedman!

You realise this page alone will be ranked (page 1) for 100s and 100s of keywords!

Admittedly lots of them will be 4+ word phrases that aren't searched very much, but this is besides the point.

There is no limit to the number of keywords you can target, other than that more keywords = more resources, and most people have a limit to their resources.

Regards
Will

Edit: In fact, I just went searching for random 4 word phrases that appear on this page once, and this thread is in the top 5-10 on well over half!

I would recommend no more than 2 or 3. Since many of the major factors in on page optimization are limited, if you're keywords are even a little competitive, you won't be able to rank well for all of them.

Depends on the keywords. Anyone who has given you advice here without knowing the actual keywords is full of it.

Sure it does sound like a lot of keywords BUT it can be done.

Just need to make sure your content is optimized and relevant for the keyword terms that are being searched.

If he wants to rank for "Pink Shoes" and the site is about baseball bats then that will probably not work out.

As long as it's relevant, give it a go. =-)

-Omar

we can use 3-5 keyword but not more than that.

It's too much. Unless there are several persons to do this with you. 3~5 keywords is a hard work.

I only have 3 to 5 keywords for my homepage. i don't think it is advisable to use 50 keywords in one page. You can not use all those keywords in one page ( on-page for homepage).

The optimum number of keywords for a page to be optimized is 3 to 5.

I really don't understand the reasoning behind much of what has been said here. Why would anyone only want to try to rank for a few keywords instead of many?
It doesn't make any sense to me. Someone said that it could be penalized for spam (by having 50 keywords). I could understand thatif it were the same keyword 50 times, but how can 50 different keywords be spam?
By using synonyms, putting the words in a different order, using plurals etc it's perfectly feasible, and I said in an earlier post I target 30 without any problem. To all those who say it shouldn't or couldn't be done, have you actually tried it or are you just repeating what is often said?

Allow me to give you some updated specifics. My target is the UK, and of my keywords 27 are high competition and 3 medium according to Adwords.
16 are two word, 11 are three word, and 3 are four word.
Currently 19 are on page 1, 7 are on page 2 and the remaining 4 are on page 3.

Ok 30 isn't 50 but the principle is the same, and if there were more I wished to target I could do so by adding content to the page.

Hi,

I think you can rank all the 50 keywords in your homepage with "rel=canonical"(for home page). So that your home page will rank well for all the keywords.

Lets hear from you guys as I am right or wrong.

Waiting for response.

one or two at the most

I only put 4 on my homepage, and also for most pages.

what I am talking about is ranking one page for say 50 + keywords.

^^ yes. Lots of long-tails (can be hundreds or even thousands) and 2-10 high traffic keywords.

i have many keyword on my site..almost of them is okay

Rank the homepage with 1 keyword and then create the next 50 keywords as a page on the site. Remember to rank a page requires unique content with the specific keywords you are targeting. How can you write a good unique article with 50 keywords on it unless you write a 100,000 word article about it?

way too much, but it will probably make the link building more natural.
natural link building will be very diverse.