TL;DR - I need to use a keyword heavily across my site, how do I avoid penalization?
Full story:
Just read John Tabita’s article on writing for SEO- very helpful!
One confusing thing: he said that you should only use your keywords 2-3X per page and that they should be unique to that page. My company makes folding bikes, and so the keyword “folding bike” appears everywhere on our site.
We want to rank highly for “folding bike” - will the fact that it appears so often, necessarily, on our site hurt our SERP ranking?
If so, what do you think we should do? Your advice is appreciated!
I would say you should just write naturally about your subject matter and the keywords should take care of themselves. You can always use synonyms of keywords here and there if you feel you are over-repeating them, that may help for a wider range of search terms.
Agreed. Considering that you used your keyword 3 times in a relatively short post where using it once would have sufficed suggests you may need to think about this more before you publish your content.
Follow up question: as I want my homepage to rank for “folding bike,” do I need to make that the keyword for the homepage, but not use “folding bike” on any other pages of the site?
@johntabita’s article stated that each page should have unique keywords. Is using synonyms in the body text the best way to get around this? Or will simply changing the keywords in the meta data suffice?
If the other pages are about folding bikes, then it may just be a good idea to mention folding bikes on them.
If the other pages are about something different, then they are probably not relevant and don’t need to be mentioned.
I’ll have to read the article to see exactly what you are talking about.
The pages should certainly have unique content and not be repetitive of other pages, but I’m not sure about not reusing the same words. If a word is relevant to the topic in hand, it should be used.
Titles and descriptions should be unique, but things like descriptions are really just for the benefit of visitors (as should the body text actually).
As the entire site is about various forms of folding bike, it would be pretty difficult to avoid using the term on every page, IMHO.
Keyword stuffing is the inappropriate use of the same term. e.g.
Knitting is a great hobby. Knitting doesn’t require much equipment - just knitting needles (sometimes called knitting pins), knitting patterns, knitting yarn and a few knitting accessories. Knitting can be done by anyone anywhere. You can try knitting on a train or knitting on a bus. Carry your knitting to the cafe at lunchtime. Remember to take your knitting pattern and your knitting accessories too!
That really doesn’t read naturally; there are much better ways to word the same information. On the other hand, if I run a site about knitting, it would be expected and quite acceptable that the term occurs several times on each page. So as @SamA74 says, use the term where it is appropriate and don’t fall into the trap of obsessing over it.
If you’re referring to the keyword meta tag, you can forget about it, as no major search engine uses it now. For meta description and title, the same rules apply as for the main text: use the most appropriate wording.
