How many keywords are optimal?

[Hogbeast]

I know you shouldn't put every word on your website as a keyword, how many is optimal? Is there a limit that search engines have?

[mcavill]

From my experiences I think it's typical to target 1-3 key phases a page. I suppose that will vary from topic to topic, but from my log files most pages on my sites get their traffic from only one of two phrases.

[Marcia]

If you're talking about the whole site as a whole, you can start with the basic core keywords and watch your logs or stats for a while. When you start to see a number of hits for the same terms pretty regularly, you can check those out and add pages for those to serve the needs of your site visitors if that's what they seem to be interested in.

[Hogbeast]

I'm asking because I wonder if I should use the regular keywords and also use some unique keywords that I think people will search under, also. I'm just wondering if there is a penalty from the search engines if I use too many.

[mcavill]

I'm asking because I wonder if I should use the regular keywords and also use some unique keywords that I think people will search under, also. I'm just wondering if there is a penalty from the search engines if I use too many.

unique keywords are good - if they're getting searched on. You can have a look at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ to see how many people search a term on the overture network.

if I understand what you mean buy regular words, they are of course also good, but probably harder to hit in the early days of a site.

Say you're targeting used car sales, and going for the term "car for sale" (quoteless of course), it would take a while (unless you use some of the special "skills" people round here have) however having a page that was titled "used ford escort 2.0 ghia not very rusty" might hit the number one spot for that term quite quickly - so on a new site it's worth, IMO, optimising quite a lot of pages targeting more unique terms to get the traffic.

I don't think google is too bothered about the site, unless you are doing fairly dodgy things overall, they usually just rank the page based on the page (and it's links).

[mcanerin]

I just want to clear some stuff up here, since we might all be talking about different things.

SEO Lingo Regarding Keywords

Keyword (AKA Keyphrase) - one or more words a searcher will put into a search engine with the expectation of finding what they are looking for as a result.

Keyword Density - the % of instances a keyword appears on your page compared to the total content of the page. Most of the time 2-8% is "natural", though it can go higher or lower.

Keywords Metatag - The keywords that the webmaster puts into the tag in the header of a page that looks like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="some, keywords, here">This is usually ignored by search engines (esp Google), but can be a good spot to put in misspellings. I would personally never put more than about 12-15 words here, and you are better off with 3-8 well chosen ones. Not that it will make much of a difference to your rankings.

Keyword Research - the process of finding out what the searchers would most likely type in to get to a relevant part of your site, then comparing that to how many are doing it. Typical tools include wordtracker, log files and so forth.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) - invented by Sumantra Roy, it's a part of the Wordtracker toolkit and lots of people ask what it is. It basically compares the number of searches that people do on a particular keyword to the number of competing sites for that keyword, with the assumtion that it's a good idea to target a keyword that is popular to searchers but doesn't have a lot of competition. There are issues with this but that's the short version.

Keyword List - the list of keywords you end up with after doing keyword research. You want to make sure that your website matches this list as much as practical. If your research shows that people do 1000 searches a day for "Calgary Real Estate" and 12 searches a day for "Real Estate Calgary", then you want to make sure you are optimizing your site mostly for "Calgary Real Estate". You don't ignore the smaller searches, but you would usually want to focus your attention on the ones most likely to drive the most number of qualified visitors to your site.

Keyword Stuffing - putting a huge number of keywords on your page, or alternatively putting a smaller number a huge amount of times on the page. Places include title, Alt tag attributes, links, headings, metadata, comment tags (useless and spammy), content and emphasised (bold, italic, etc). Some is ok, normal, and natural, lots is not.

Keyword Overlap - this is when you have keywords like "german beer parlor", "german beer", "german parlor" and "beer parlor". Because you are optimising for more than one phrase at a time due to the overlap ("german beer parlor" contains all the keywords the other phrases have), you optimise for more than 1-3 phrases on the page - which is the normal amount.

Keyword Matching - a search engine will match an exact phrase in preference to an approximate one. This means that if a searcher is looking for a KW that says "English Toffee" it will match results in approximately this order of preference:


English Toffee
english toffee
Are you English? Toffee is bad for your teeth.
When trying English candies, be sure to try the toffee.
Like toffee? The English make it very well.


Keyword Stemming - this takes a keyword like "book" and also looks for "books" This is not common because some words resist this type of action, like "fish", for example. There is a difference between a fish and going out to fish. Stemming would break down here.

Negative Keyword (-KW) - a keyword that you DON'T want in a search ( ie a search for "china -wedding" would remove wedding gift suggestions for a search on china

Positive Keyword (+KW) - A keyword that must appear with your search (ie a search for "china +country" gets rid of the giftware and focuses the search on the country of China.

Ok, now that we have all that out of the way, it sounds like you are trying to put your whole keyword list in your keywords metatag and are wondering how much is too much. If that is the correct interpretation of your question, then the answer is you should focus each page on 1-3 keywords and maybe some misspellings of those keywords, and that is what your metatag (if you use it - it's optional) should have, as well.

NEVER use the same metatags, titles, and descriptions of every page of your site - each page is different, and your title and metatags should reflect that.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[Hogbeast]

Wow Ian,

Yes that helped and thank you so much for breaking it all down for me. It is so competitive and I see why people pay so much for someone to optimize their site, there's so much information that you really need someone who specializes in it.

Your post really gives me a great overview and something to focus on.
Thanks!

Erica