International SEO
How Many Keywords should you Optimize for?
Recently I posted about a whitepaper I found from Business.com that discusses B2B internet marketing. One item I picked out from this article was about optimizing for keywords -
“Most B2B SEO projects start with an existing web site, and many proceed from keyword research to selecting pages to optimize to planning how to work the target keywords into the page. Rather than stuffing pages with keywords, consider optimizing each page for a single keyword and creating more pages with useful content whenever you need to cover more keywords.”
The paper goes on to say -
“We find that most B2B websites are limited in the overall number of pages on their website. As a result, when it comes to SEO, we often find that B2B marketers try to optimize for too many keywords per page. We would therefore encourage B2B marketers to keep the ratio of keywords to pages between 1-1.5 keywords per page, and if need be, create more relevant content to target additional keywords.”
My experience has been the same with most of my clients. Although our recommendations are a bit more liberal – we believe you can optimize for 1-3 keyword phrases per page as long as the keywords are closely related. This will give you the best chance for high rankings for your keywords.
The reason we suggest only 1-3 keywords is because of how the search engines rank pages. For example, the ‘title tag’ is one of the most important places for your keyword to be. However, we limited to the number of words we can fit in the title because of the parameters the search engines have set.
Another reason it’s good to use only a few keywords per page is to provide the best content for your visitors. When you focus on only one or two keywords, you’re copy will stay on topic and be easy for your visitor follow. It’s similar to writing a paper for school, you want to have a theme and reinforce it through out.
If you have more keywords than pages available on your site, then you’ll need to create new pages to support those keywords. The search engines reward sites that generate new content so this is another way to improve your visibility.
February 5th, 2009 at 2:45 am
More and more people these days are turning to one of the most popular businesses around – the business of affiliate marketing. In this business, there are no bosses, deadlines to meet, or piles of work that have to be finished by the end of the day. In order to succeed, you only need the necessary tools.
February 5th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Use keywords responsibly in order to get the best results. But there are sometimes that you need also to be aware of the thin line between the number of keywords and stuffing too much.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
thx man good tips