How Many Keyword Phrases Should I Target?
It is hard to think of SEO without thinking about keywords and keyword phrases. After all, you need to have keyword phrases in your content so that users will be able to find you on the Internet. Keywords are also vital in regards to letting the search engines know what your website is about.
Deciding how many keyword phrases you should target can be a frustrating process. The first step is to find good quality keywords which are relevant to your website’s purpose. If your website is about car collecting, you may want to use phrases such as “car collecting”, “classic car collecting” and “collecting cars”.
Play around with phrases that users will commonly search for in the search engines. You want to be specific enough with your keywords that you will get users which are searching for the information you have, but you also do not want to use broad terms such as “cars”. If you use general or common keywords, you will be competing with every other website that contains that word. That’s a big market to be in!
Next, you need to decide just how many phrases you want to use. Remember, these are words and phrases that need to be included in the writing on your website. If you use too many phrases, the writing will look weird to users and it will not make sense. You will also need to pick keyword phrases for every page on your website. You do not just want to concentrate on the main page or the page which provides the most information.
If you include more than three to five keyword phrases, the search engines may view this as spamming. You never want to make a search engine think you are spamming it due to the fact that it could get your website penalized or even banned in the index. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you also do not want to use too few keyword phrases or the search engine may not be able to learn enough about your website.
The general rule of thumb is that you should use no less than two keyword phrases per page, but no more than five. Five is really pushing it but if integrated properly, five can work with pages that include a lot of content on them. When thinking about this, think about keyword density as well. As mentioned, you do not want the writing to look strange to users. If you have an article that is 500 words long and you are including 4 keyword phrases, it can be a stretch. You would need to repeat these terms within the 500 word article so that they consume three to five percent of the article.
