The question of how many keywords you should SEO your website for is one that is faced by SEO companies and SEO professionals every day. Opinion is very much divided on the subject.
Some SEO companies believe that simply optimising the homepage of your website is sufficient. They will offer you no more than six different key phrases and optimise the homepage of your website for those keywords. This form of SEO does work, to a degree. It works in the sense that your website, or rather your homepage, will improve slightly in the rankings for those keyphrases.
However, how much traffic will those keyphrases generate?
When you limit yourself to just six (or less) keywords, how do you take advantage of the growing trends of search that show more longtail phrases are being searched for by Google users? Longtail means a combination of different words, rather than just one or two words. For example, rather than search for ‘stationery’ people would be searching for ‘elegant wedding stationery’.
This is something that your SEO company wouldn’t have optimised for with their six key phrase policy.
In addition, by just optimising just your homepage, your ‘optimised page’ wouldn’t be targeted, and therefore relevant, to all of your keywords. This would mean that your website will never achieve the highest rankings for all of your keywords due to the very nature of how it has been SEO’d.
At StuckOn we believe that you shouldn’t limit your keywords unnecessarily. We believe that you should concentrate on longtail search and we optimise your entire website for relevant search phrases. This ensures that different pages of your website rank for keywords that are relevant to them. This not only improves your search engine rankings, but it also increases your conversions as customers are entering your website on relevant pages in answer to their queries.
It would have been more helpful if you had answered the question your article title proposed.
OK Jeff, 4.
That’s wrong however – I think you may have missed the point of the article. You’ve obviously read it hoping for some magic number to aim for, but there isn’t one. That’s the point.
We wrote that article because people often ask how many keywords they should SEO for, but to pick an arbitrary number of keywords is missing the point of SEO entirely.
There is truth in that you can optimise for, and rank for, more keywords if your website is larger however. Bigger websites have more words, hence more opportunities to optimise for more keywords.
If you want a real secret, each page of a website should really only be optimised for one keyword – so if you want to rank for thousands of keywords, thousands of pages are the order of the day. Hope this helps.