Keywords: How many repetitions is too many?

[wfernley]

I was curious about how many times your target keyword should be displayed on your website. My target keyword is displayed on my site 12 times.

Is this too much? or could it be considered too little?

I know there is some speculation regarding how many times your keyword should be displayed on your site. Can anyone help me out?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[edited by: tedster at 9:50 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2006]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

The best advice I could give you is to study the top ten results for any query where you hope to see your page appear. If it's like most that I research, you will anything from large amounts of keyword repetition to literally zero. That's because off-page factors can have such a strong influence these days -- more on some SEs than others.

There's no number for keyword frequency that I could give you -- not even a ballpark. Just use the keyword in sane and obvious places (title element, meta description, opening content, some anchor text, etc) and repeat as feels natural to the writing style. Measure the results, and re-examine/change as seems necessary.

[wfernley]

Thank you for your reply Tedster.

I have examined the top 10 ranked sites and their keyword density is all different. I guess it's something I shouldn't worry about. Just keep the density around 10% to 15% and like you mentioned have the keywords in bold tags, h1 tags, title, meta tags, etc...

Thanks again!

[tedster]

In most cases, I think that 10% to 15% will be detected as artificially high -- unless the page is extremely short. Keep the keyword use to "sane and obvious places" and aim for very natural sounding language.