Adsense

Adwords

Affiliate Links

Algorithm Changes

Arms Race

.Com or .Co.uk?

Databases

Database Example

Duplicate Content

Hyphens

Index Speed

IP Addresses

Link Popularity

Link Relevance

Meta Tags

Monitoring

Next Year Ahead

One Roof (all under)

Organic v Paid

Page Rank

Pay Per Click

Quality Criteria

Repeat Keywords

Supatags™

Word Per Page

Yahoo!

SEO > Articles > New York 2004 >

How many times should I repeat my target keyword on each page, and how should this keyword density be spread out around the page?

If the text containing your core keywords is natural, there should be no problem using the keyword is many times as is appropriate for the page (upto a limit of perhaps 10, although this varies from one search engine to the next, and is not a fixed ceiling). Even though search engines such as Yahoo and Google use different algorithms to determine the relevancy of each keyword, there is no major advantage in trying to produce separate pages to please both engines, unless you have several different pages which are all related to each other, but not identical (e.g. a section of a website dealing with cheap flights to New York could have a Yahoo friendly page about cheap flights to New York Newark, and a Google friendly page about cheap flights to New York JFK).

As a minimum, each keyword phrase that you are optimising your page four should be included in:

•  The title tag.

•  The main body of the text (at least twice).

•  Bold and / or italics in the main text body (done in a relevant way, not just for the sake of it).

•  The text of hyperlinks going to other pages.

•  The keyword and description tags.

•  An H1 heading near the top of the page (often similar in content, but not identical, to the title tag).

There are also marginal gains from using keywords in the alt tags, and in using anchor text and jump menus, although these should not be abused.