Achieving top 10, even top 3 placement on Google and other leading search engines is the goal of any search engine optimisation efforts.

If you have already invested time in researching the best keywords for your website then you will have a list as long as your arm of words / phrases you wish to rank highly for.

With this in mind, how many keywords should your website target? Perhaps I should rephrase. How many keywords should each of your webs pages target?

Answer:

#1

You should not try to optimise one webpage for one than one keyword / phrase. The phrase can of course consist of multiple words but a different phrase will require a different page.

Why? Well it’s much better for ranking purposes  if a web page is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many search terms. If you concentrate on one keyword per page then it is much more likely that your web page will get a top listing on Google for that keyword / phrase.

You will get the best possible results if you optimise different pages of your website for different but related keywords.

How to optimise a web page for your chosen keyword

When you optimise a web page for a keyword, it's important that the right elements of your web page contain the keyword in the right frequency. In the old days simply hitting the optimum % of keyword density used to do the trick. Not any more. The only true way of measuring keyword density levels is to evaluate your top 10 competitors for that exact phrase and evaluate how much / how little they use the keyword phrase within the core elements of the website content, i.e. meta data, h1 tags, inbound links, outbound links, the content itself.. and the list goes on.

The keyword competitor analysis is a task the SEO-Authority do as part of an SEO Audit & Analysis Report, or please contact us for more information

Single keywords Vs keyword phrases

You should always aim to optimise your web pages for a very targeted keyword that consists of many words. A keyword that consists of many words is called "key phrase". This has several advantages:

1. It's much easier to get top 10 rankings for targeted key phrases because the competition is not as fierce as the competition for single word key words.

2. Key phrases attract much more targeted website visitors. People who search for "Football" might be interested in magazines, clubs or even the players. People who search for "Buy Cheap football kits" are looking for inexpensive football kits and they are ready to buy. There is little reward in optimising your website for keywords that don’t result in orders to your basket. What it  will result in is a high bounce rate of traffic from your site.

3. By optimising your web page for a key phrase, you automatically optimise your web page for the parts of that key phrase. For example, your web page will automatically be optimised for "football kits", "football" and other keywords if you optimise your page for "Buy Cheap football kits"

Optimise one web page for one keyword and introduce and optimise as many webpage’s as necessary. More is defiantly better!

If many pages of your website have been optimised for many related keywords then your website will look relevant to the topic of your keywords (in the example: "football"). If search engines think that your website is relevant to a special topic then it will be easier to get high rankings for the individual keywords.