Reusing a focus keyword for different articles - bad for SEO?

[Alexious]

Greetings everyone!

I'm the owner of a newly published website. We're using Wordpress platform and also Yoast plugin for SEO, which is one of the most popular downloads for the whole WP platform.
Basically the creator believes that using one focused keyword is best:

The focus keyword is not the meta keywords tag

This is important to note, if you think the "focus keyword" field is where you fill your meta keywords: no it's not. I have a very specific opinion about meta keywords, which I expressed in my post: meta keywords, why I don't use them. Read that if you haven't yet.

Focus on your focus keyword

Think of the focus keyword as the topic of your page or post. A good post doesn't have multiple topics, it explores one topic. If you enter a focus keyword, the Page Analysis functionality will use that as input for its analysis of your post. It can only do this for one focus keyword at a time.

While that's a technical reason, working around that wouldn't be an issue. What is an issue, and also the main reason the functionality works as it does, is that we've found it's already hard for most people to focus a page on one keyword. Optimizing a post for multiple keywords without spamming is actually very hard. So, try and optimize your pages for one keyword and do that well.

The problem with this is, with the type of content we write, posting about the thing is daily practice - and yet, I feared that using the same Focus Keyword would have been some kind of penalty. In fact, this seems to be the case: I've tried now to add another post that is meant to be a recap page with all our articles about a game, and of course the keyword is the title of the game; but Yoast warned me in the post analysis that I had used the Focus Keyword in an actual post about that game, adding "be sure to make very clear which URL on your site is the most important for this keyword". How am I supposed to do that?

Is there any workaround? For us, it makes no sense to use different keywords that are not relevant, and we'll be adding posts and custom posts every single day, so they are bound to occur multiple times. Any tips from SEO experts? Thanks in advance.

[edited by: tedster at 12:59 am (utc) on Apr 15, 2013]
[edit reason] no specifics, please [/edit]

[netmeg]

The Yoast plugin is a great resource, but those tips are just that - tips, and they aren't a replacement for real search engine optimization, or a good user experience.

Write for the users and don't worry about the SEO tips. They're good for a generic kind of "don't forget this" advice, but not something to build your entire SEO strategy around.

[Alexious]

Thanks for the advice. Can you give some more details about "real search engine optimization"?

[netmeg]

Not really, it's a pretty detailed subject, but there's lots of resources here on WebmasterWorld. Make sure Google can see your whole site, your architecture and links make sense, and your pages are properly themed, with page titles that accurately describe the content therein.