Comments on: Search Engine Optimization Tip #3: Keywords on Your Web Page

By: Geoff Anderson

Geoff Anderson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:46:49 +0000

In my research, I have found that keyword repetition should not exceed 5 times per page, otherwise the crawlers will treat your site as spam.

By: Kristen

Kristen — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:00:42 +0000

In our upcoming site relaunch, the theme is “show, don’t tell” — the site has social networking components. As a result our pages have very little copy, to the point that I have concern that keywords are only included few times (1 or 2!). What would you say is an ideal number of total words to have on a page in order to optimize for SEO with a ~10% keyword density ratio? Thank you!

By: Bill Hartzer

Bill Hartzer — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:03:53 +0000

That’s a great question, Eric. You certainly don’t want to mention the keyword phrase over and over again.

It’s kind of a fine line between having good copy on your page that human visitors will like and the number of times you “need to mention it” on the page “for the search engines”.

One way to get an idea of how many times you should mention the phrase is to look at the current search engine rankings for that phrase. I mean, search for the phrase in Google and take a look at the pages that are already ranking for that keyword phrase. Some will mention it more than others, and you can see how many times “is acceptable”.

If you want to go further with it, you could actually look at the pages that are ranking in the top 10 for the keyword phrase you’re targeting and check each page’s keyword density. You’ll get a percentage for each one and then you will be able see “what’s acceptable” when it comes to the length of the page and how many times the keyword phrase is mentioned on the page.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:50:32 +0000

But how can i know if my keywords have been mentioned too much times and might be considered as a spam?