How many keywords should be selected for SEO?

Question

I am very new in this field and I wanted to do SEO for my blog .

1. How many keywords should I select?
2. After selecting the keywords,should I always focus on those keywords only?I mean whatever the post is I must add those keywords?or should it depend upon the posts?

Answer 1

There is no number of keywords for a blog or a website. It's a number per page as it's the pages that are ranked, not entire sites or blogs. Each page should be about a very specific topic so the number of keywords it targets, intentionally or not, shouldn't be very large. If you find a page covers a large number of keywords that may be a sign it needs to be split up into multiple pages or posts.

I'm not going to give you a specific number of keywords to target per page as not only isn't there a set number, but you should be writing your content for your users and not focusing on how you can fit keywords into the content. If you write your content properly you'll find that approximately a handful of popular/semi-popular keywords will be targeted naturally for you with a bunch of long tail keywords sprinkled in, too.

Answer 2

If you're talking about meta keywords, you should try and set keywords for each page differently, according to what info is in the page. Mind that Google doesn't pay attention to meta keywords anymore. Anyway, when going for SEO you should keep this in mind:

• Select a few keywords that are related to the page's scope and are related to what people will look for. When writing about car insurance, don't waste any effort by adding 'car' or 'insurance' as separate keywords. Use 'car insurance' instead. When writing about Lady GaGa (random example) don't add Gwen Stefani in the keywords "because people who are interested in her surely are interested in GaGa as well". It doesn't work that way:

• Choose keywords that are present in the page's contents. You can have slight variations (fulfilment vs. fulfillment, blog vs. weblog) but don't use keywords that don't appear in the contents at all

• Try not to use more than 5 keywords for a page, plus a valid alternate spelling / variant of each. 5 to 10 is usually acceptable, more is spammy. Don't go for misspellings, it's a waste of effort. Maybe scoring high for Britny Spears will get you some of the people that can't spell to your site, but there's always 100x more people that will spell it right. Google will correct your misspellings anyway, so don't bother. Oh, also put your keywords in order of relevance. Apparently some search engines mark earlier keywords as more important, though I have never seen proof of this.

• In the page's content, try to avoid using each keyword more than one in 20 words. More will look like keywords cramming and search engines don't like that.

So short answer:

1. five to ten
2. always base keywords on the page itself, not the entire website