Introduction
Keywords are your best friend for SEO, especially if you want to get your website found by a search engine. Too few and you won’t rank, too many and you could get your website penalized. Since you’re reading this article we can assume you care about your SEO. So, the question becomes how many keywords should you use for SEO? Find out everything you need to know in this article by the Cindtoro team.
A brief primer on Keywords
In the context of SEO, keywords are used to help a search engine identify relevant content that a user is looking for. Think about it like this, search engines like Google similar to large librarians. Their index works similar to how books are stored in a library. Google uses keywords as well as their ranking algorithm to identify where to place your “book” or in this case your website within their search engine.
The Importance of keywords
There are numerous benefits to adding terms throughout your website content. In a nutshell properly utilized keywords help you:
- Find information quickly
- Optimize your site for SEO
- Promote products or services
- Help Google place you properly in their index.
What are the different types of keywords for SEO?
There are a few different types of search keywords to understand. In the next few sections we will break them down for you.
Primary keywords
these are your most important words you want your website to show up for.
Secondary keywords
These are other related keywords that are still relevant but are explicitly targeted like the primary ones are These can be thought of as synonyms and related terms.
Long tail Keywords
These types of terms are words that contain 3 or more terms. Long tail keywords normally have low search volume but high intent.
Short tail keywords
Short tail keywords are words that contain 1 to 2 keywords. They also drive the highest amount of traffic but just because the traffic is high does not mean it is a good thing to target them.
Understanding Keyword Density
Keyword Density or (KD) for short refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage or within a piece of content. If you have ever used keyword research tools before this is normally outlined as a ratio or percentage of the overall word count. KD is also sometimes referred to as keyword frequency.
Keyword density is an important concept of SEO you must understand if you want to avoid getting your website hit with a Google penalty.
Keyword Density Formula
The formula for Keyword density is as follows:
To calculate keyword density, divide the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content by the total number of words in that content, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
For ease of use here is a breakdown of the formula:
Formula: (Number of keyword occurrences / Total word count) * 100
Example: If a keyword appears 15 times in a 500-word article: (15 / 500) * 100 = 3%
When to use the formula
You should use the keyword density formula if you want to avoid a Google penalty from keywords stuffing. You can also use the formula to understand your competitors keyword strategies to uncover ways to outperform them.
So, How Many Keywords Should I Use For SEO?
The answer to this question is there is no hard and fast rule for the number of keywords you can use for SEO. Every page should target 1 particular keyword; this will almost always be your primary keyword. You should also look to include some of your secondary supporting keywords to help give your website the best possible chance at ranking on the search engine.
Using other keyword variations
We briefly touched on secondary keywords above understanding how to use Secondary keywords will help to reinforce the success of your webpage or overall website. This can be done successfully by strategically sprinkling them throughout your website in a natural way.
Strategically incorporating your secondary keywords will help to support your primary keywords. This is crucial for improving both search engine visibility and the user experience while also ensuring that your content covers a broad range of search queries.
Why Use Secondary Keywords – What are their benefits?
Improved Search Engine Visibility
Secondary keywords help search engines understand the context and overall broader topic of your content, this helps to increase the chances of your webpage appearing for related searches.
Enhanced User Experience
They also help to enhance the user experience because as you address a wider range of search queries, you are helping to cater your content to a broader audience and thus improve the likelihood that a user finds exactly what they’re looking for.
Comprehensive Content Coverage and diversified reach
A search engine wants to serve users content that they will actually enjoy. Secondary keywords allow you to cover subtopics and related questions. This helps to provide a more complete and informative experience for users. They also help attract high quality traffic by capitalizing on a wider range of search queries. This flows back into enhancing visibility.
Improved Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO is highly complicated to understand at a technical level. So to keep things simple as you use related secondary terms, you help signal to a search engine your content is comprehensive and relevant to a range of related topics, improving your page’s semantic SEO ranking.
Where to place keywords
Now that you understand the background behind keywords you need to know where to place them. To assist with SEO there are strategic places to put the keywords you want to rank for. Lets dive into these areas below.
Meta title
This is the blue text that you see on the search engine result page and is one of the most important areas for your primary keyword.
Meta description
A meta description is a great place to put your primary keywords and if you can squeeze them in – your secondary keywords. Keep your meta descriptions between 120 and 160 characters.
Header tags
Heading tags go in order of importance from 1 through 6 with h1 being the most important and h6 being the least. You don’t need to put key terms in every one of your heading tags if you do you may run the risk of keyword stuffing. (some of them)
Alt text for images
Image alt text allows for machines and people using screenreaders to understand the content of an image. Properly optimized alt text can also improve Google’s image search results. You do not need to add the keywords into every one of the alt text sections, just some of them.
Introduction paragraph
The introduction paragraph is also a great place to add your primary and secondary keywords. It helps to tell the search engine exactly what the page is about as fast as possible. This helps save time understanding what your content is about.
Closing Paragraph
The final important place to drive home what your webpage is written about is your conclusion paragraph. This can be done in many different ways but one of the easiest ways to do this is to restate your original primary keywords. Pay particular attention to the closing paragraph of this article and you will pick up on it.
Conclusion
By this point you should be well prepared to understand how many keywords to use for SEO. If you need help improving your SEO and implementing keywords into your website the Cindtoro team is here to help.
FAQs
Are there Keyword Research SEO tools I can use?
Yes, there are numerous tools you can use for keyword research. Some of these are more intuitive than others displaying information such as keyword volume, search intent, trends and other important pieces of data. These tools can be used for many different important tasks. Common tools are SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner (GKP), Google Search Console (GSC) and others are solid options
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is the process of manipulating search engine results in an attempt to get keywords to rank on Google search. This tactic is done by placing repetitive sets of keywords in an unnatural manner. Keyword stuffing is looked down upon and is known as a blackhat SEO technique