I have a wordpress site with a SEO plugin. The plugin lets you enter keywords. I am trying to figure out how many times should a keyword appear in an article before you should use it as a keyword in a plugin like this.
I mean, there are many keywords in my articles, but usually they just appear one time.
Does that make sense?
IMHO the more important consideration is the All in one SEO plugin’s “description” option. Default is to use an excerpt of the beginning of the post. Although it’s usually a good idea to have a post get to the topic straight away, this isn’t always the case and a custom description would be in order.
Absolute rubbish. It’s going to be difficult to write a page about a topic without mentioning that topic at various points throughout the page. Use your keyword as often as feels natural within the flow of the writing. Don’t try to cram it in everywhere, but don’t be afraid of using it when it’s the right word to use.
Going back to your suggestion … what possible purpose would it serve to have a search and ranking algorithm that arbitrarily promoted sites for a particular word that appeared only in the first and final paragraphs? Why would Google give extra credit to a page that did that? There is no way that that would help give more relevant search results, so Google aren’t going to do it.
When in doubt, ask yourself “How would Google benefit from this scenario?”, and if you can’t think of a plausible reason why it would make sense, the chances are it doesn’t. Google is not going to arbitrarily promote or penalise sites/pages for complying with or breaking random and spurious rules like “Use your targeted keyword only in the first and last paragraph”. It’s nonsense.
I see, so I’m writing an article about ‘Bad SEO advice’, do you think I’d use that keyword phrase in the Title maybe? How bout in a heading too? And the copy?
Or maybe I should take your bad advice and only use it twice in the whole article because anyone trying to figure out what my article is about would definitely look at the last couple of words, I always scan to the bottom of an article to see what it’s about. Not.
In your article, use your targeted keyword two times only. The first one is in the starting (in first paragraph) and the other in the ending (in last paragraph).
Ok given what you’re saying, where does one enter keywords for a post? Or do the search engines find them and you don’t need to do anything about keywords?
I would imagine that the “keywords” you’re putting into the plugin go into a
<meta name="keywords" content="(keywords go here)">
element in the page head. If that’s the case, they’re largely irrelevant. Google completely ignores the meta keywords, and while the consensus is that Yahoo and Bing pay some attention to them, it’s going to have little effect on your position in the search results.
The reason for using the keywords tag was to allow authors to target particular words, which may or may not actually appear in the content. You don’t necessarily want to repeat the theme of the site over and over in the text, or to use all its different synonyms, so search engines might not pick up so easily what your target audience is all about.
Since then, spamming has got more prolific (where authors put all sorts of irrelevant but popular words in the keywords in the hope that their site will get listed when people search for those words) and search engines have got more sophisticated (so they are much better able to understand the context and focus of your site without you needing to spell it out), which is why Google have dropped it altogether and most other search engines give very little weight to it.
In a nutshell, keywords are the most important words for your site. That’s all it means. Sometimes people get really worked up about “keywords” and try to get around the search engines’ ranking systems, but that isn’t a workable long-term strategy. Search engines are good at working out what your site is about, so as long as you write sensibly and use the sort of words that visitors are likely to search for, you’ll be fine.