How Many Keywords to Target on a Web Page?

November 25th, 2009 by Nicholas Halmond

When it comes to SEO, keywords are what people pay more attention to than anything else. After all, with the right selection and usage of keywords you are giving yourself a fantastic shot at getting ranked highly and receiving a heavy load of traffic. However, sometimes people fail to realize a simple fact: the number of keywords you target on a single page makes a difference.

Most of us performing SEO work tend to want to take things too far. In other words, we get ahead of ourselves and try to everything we can as quickly as possible. With this thinking, people sometimes jam 10 keywords onto a single web page, hoping that they will rank highly for all of them. However, this is not the way it works any longer and too many keywords can damage your rankings.

SEO is actually very refined. Maybe a decade ago you could get away with doing anything that was related to search engine optimization and see success. There was such little competition, and so few tried and true tactics, that anything you tried to do would help you succeed.

Today, many people practicing SEO try to target too many keywords on a single webpage. They figure, if I have 25 figures I'm trying to rank for, I should try to make every one of my web pages get ranked for all of those keywords. It's like playing the percentages, giving yourself more options and therefore ensuring that you'll see great results.

Therefore a more effective strategy is to follow the motto that less is more for SEO. Instead of trying to jam every keyword you have on a single page, you should be using far less and spreading them out around different pages of your site, improving each page's positioning for certain phrases or topics.

Knowing all of this then, what is the correct number of keywords to use on a web page? For a web page with 500 words or so, a sound strategy is to go after two or three individual keywords. For a page with less content you'll want less keywords, and for a page with more content you can target a few additional keywords.

When you divide your keywords up onto individual pages like this for SEO, then you'll be able to target each and every one of them more effectively. If you have 20 web pages on your site and 50 keywords, you can dedicate each page to two or three of them, expanding your scope and your presence in the search engines.

Therefore it's important to use common sense and base your judgments according to how much content you have, and what looks natural to you as you look at your page. Remember that with SEO, most people try to do entirely way too much. Keep it simple and keep your focus to 2 or 3 keywords per web page.

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