Search Engine Optimisation Tips | C2 Web Design

Keywords - how often?

lthough a reasonably short article this week it does highlight an important, and often misused, topic of keywords.

From the past articles you should now be able to identify which keywords are right for your business and one of the most commonest question I am asked (apart from obviously how do I get to number 1 on a search engine!) is how many times should my main keywords be shown in my site?

Well the general answer is not too little, but not too much. If your keyword count (number of times you keyword appears on your page) is too small it will not be deemed as relevant. If it is too much a search engine may believe you are trying to trick it and penalise you. So how do you get the balance just right?

The main thing to achieve is for your keyword to be approx 5-7% of all words on your page. (Note: keyword count is done page by page; it is not done by the entire site. It is often a good idea to use separate keywords for each page - especially on product pages. Promote the site on the home page, but the products on your inner pages).

To put another way for every 100 words, your main keywords should appear 5-7 times. Also if your text is split in to paragraphs you should apportion your keywords across the paragraphs - don't try and cram in all 7 keywords in the same paragraph as search engines appear to disapprove of this tactic.

Remember that your title, keyword/description META tags and ALT tags are included in this word count - so you should use these in any calculations.

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