Question: How many keywords do I use (on a page/post) when I’m building my site or optimizing it?
Answer: This is a question that I get asked all of the time. How many keywords can I have? And the easiest answer is one. Optimize each page or post for one keyword. One keyword for your home page, one keyword per blog post, one keyword per page. If you truly want to optimize your site the best way possible, stick to only one keyword.
“Do Meta-Keywords even work anymore?”
Some search engines will still look at the meta keywords section but only to see if you have multiple keywords in there and how many keywords (it’s checking to see if your keyword spamming). Other search engines (like Google) don’t even look at meta keywords anymore. I still put the ONE keyword that I’m optimizing that page for into the meta keywords section. Some smaller search engines still look at these and it does help with my internal search engine for my website.
“But what about my homepage? How many keywords can I use on it?”
On our homepage, we have 2-3 keywords present. However, we are really only optimizing for one of them. We do change our keywords around from time to time to see if there is another keyword that we can optimize better for, however, we only really try to optimize it for one at a time.
You see, we’re not trying to optimize our home page to rank high for one specific keyword. We have individual pages for that and do quite well with them.
If people are looking for a plumber in Minneapolis and they see an individual page from your website that ranks really high for Minneapolis Plumber, don’t you think they will click it if there is relevant information on that page? If your individual pages are ranking high, then your site as a whole will rank high as well.
“But we have a site that has about 20 keywords in the Meta Keywords section and we’re ranking really well.”
When I hear this I tell clients to take notice. That’s great that they are still ranking well, but they need to keep an eye on it. If all of a sudden they drop from the rankings, it may be because with all of the search engines looking at how many keywords they have in the meta keywords section, they may see that many keywords as spam. Once this happens, your rankings will plummet.
We have some test sites that are still ranking really well for certain keywords and these sites have about 15 keywords or so in the meta keywords section. However, we also have some other sites that disappeared during the Google Panda and Penguin updates. Once we changed the meta keywords section to either one keyword or took it out completely, they the sites started to rank again.
This quick post may give you an insight on how many keywords you should optimize your pages for. But take this into account before changing anything. If your page (or site) is ranking really well for a keyword and you still have some of these errors on your pages…DON’T CHANGE THEM. My suggestion would be (and it’s only a suggestion) If it’s not broken…Don’t fix it.
Let me know in the comments section if you agree/disagree with our take on how many keywords you should have.