How many times can I repeat a keyword without looking spammy to Google?

Question

I have an eCommerce based on Opencart, but I have some doubts about how many times I can repeat the same word.

For example, the keyword is present in the title, description, h1, h2 and is repeated several times in the text:

• Page Title: Shop Iphone other keyword
• Page description: Shop Iphone other keyword

(and they continue appearing below)

• H1: Shop Iphone other keyword
• H2: Shop Iphone other keyword
• 10 more times in the text: Shop iPhone

I mean, if Googlebot sees the same WORD 30 times, can it be considered SPAM? Can I lose something or can I use keywords a lot?

In WOORANK I saw my review and I noticed that I need to improve my keywords, and a lot. I have some keywords like: payment, description, promotion, sales... keywords really "empty"

[ UPDATE ]

Can repeating keywords make them lose importance?

Answer 1

Be careful. Most SEO advice stems off of old advice that was just plain wrong when it was written. It seems that much of the SEO world cannot grasp that SEO has become much closer to what it should have been all along. As well, this is a follow the leader industry even as the lemming leap off the cliff.

I will give you a quick SEO rundown.

For each page, quickly jot down the most important 2-3 keywords for that page. Create a second list for each page that are the second most important keywords. Limit this to another 2-3 or so. It is okay if you want to write down 7 or 8 or more. Do this for reference. Since your site is coming from a database, then much of your keywords will be somewhat automatic, that is, product name, manufacturer, etc. It is okay to actually skip writing these keywords down if it makes sense. You just want to create a plan of sorts. Some people like using a spreadsheet and saving it for future reference.

Create pages for humans and not machines. Make sure it is natural and helps the user more, if possible, than anyone on the net.

Your title tag is the most important thing to pay attention to short of links which we will get to. Title tags should contain your 2-3 most important keywords. Again, this can be automatic depending on the software you use. Make the title tag conversational and compelling. The title tag should be roughly 50 characters, but the limit is actually 512 pixels in Google. Bing is more forgiving. You may need to limit your title tag to less than 50 characters if there are enough wide characters (W, M, Q) to expand past the 512 pixels. You have to remember that the title tag, if done correctly, will the be the search engine result page (SERP) link. So make it appealing and motivate your user to click the link.

Your description meta-tag is the second most important thing to pay attention to. Again, this must be conversational and compelling. The description meta-tag, if done right, will be the SERP snippet. It should have your 2-3 most important keywords plus a few from the second list. Your goal is to have a 2 line SERP snippet. It is okay if it is one line, but it will not likely perform as well. It is also okay to go to three lines, but do not push it. Your description meta-tag should support both the title tag and h1 tag from a keyword perspective.

Your one and only h1 tag is the third most important thing to pay attention to. Again, conversational and compelling. But in this case, you can also think headline if it applies. Again, use your 2-3 most important keywords and one or at most three from your second list if you think it works. Your h1 tag should closely match but not be identical to the title tag. The h1 tag should support the title tag from a keyword perspective.

Any other header tags (h2, h3, h4, ...) should support the title tag, but also set themselves apart somewhat. Think of these as portions of a larger topic- How To Bake Bread would have Ingredients for Baking Bread, Mixing the Bread Ingredients, Kneading Your Bread Dough, etc. You will be keeping one eye on the 2-3 keywords and using keywords from your other list more. This is your opportunity to wedge in those keywords from your second list if it is natural to do.

Keyword density was never really a myth, but somewhat a myth. The recommended percentages were ridiculous. If you followed the density advice given, your content would be unreadable. Today, keyword density can still be seen to work on some sites (I answered a question or left a comment recently regarding eBay pages that performed well mostly due to 2 word keyword density), however, it is a Google no no and these sites are being targeted very aggressively with Panda 4.0 and 4.1 and likely soon with 4.2.

So don't do it!

Internal links. Each internal link must use the most important keywords for the target page. Since you have a store front, this might be automatic. However, if you use links within content, make sure that they vary somewhat and are conversational and fit within the content. I have several sets of links to pages; navigational, page title links (reads like an article title), and content links that can be used within content.

Inbound back links. You will not have control over most of the inbound links of course. But for the ones you do have control over, you do want to vary them as much as possible and make them conversational if possible. You do want to use the 2-3 most important keywords most of the time, but a large portion should also avoid this. For example, TMS Laptop Model 1234 v.s. Here is a great laptop for students. Your second list of keywords come into play here. Where possible, if you can get a conversational link within content that will be great but unlikely. So do the best you can. Just make sure that the linking page and target page are complimentary in topic. The link must make sense.

And never, never, never, seek a site-wide link and especially a link in the footer of a site. Make sure the links you create are natural and made for humans and not machines.

Answer 2

The ideal keywords for what you're asking is Keyword Stuffing.

It's basically defined as:

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique, which leads to banning a website from major search engines either temporarily or permanently. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content of a web page. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.

For what it matters, you shouldn't do it by any means.

Here's a good resource from Moz explaining the matter:

One of the most obvious and unfortunate spamming techniques, keyword stuffing, involves littering repetitions of keyword terms or phrases into a page in order to make it appear more relevant to the search engines. The thought behind this - that increasing the number of times a term is mentioned can considerably boost a page's ranking - is generally false. Studies looking at thousands of the top search results across different queries have found that keyword repetitions play an extremely limited role in boosting rankings, and have a low overall correlation with top placement.

The engines have very obvious and effective ways of fighting this. Scanning a page for stuffed keywords is not massively challenging, and the engines' algorithms are all up to the task.

What you might need to address is your Keyword density, but in today's time I wouldn't bother too much with it. Anyway, here's a good resource talking about it.

They conclude this:

There is a lot of seo ‘advice’ out there. Anything from keeping it under a number like 10%, or greater than 1% – truth is, keyword density is probably a seo myth, according to most professionals.

Answer 3

Over use of a keyword can certainly look spammy. Here is a relevant thread from Webmaster World: A close look at what over optimization really is:

Keyword/phrase over usage. Known by seo experts as keyword stuffing. This is also the most commong form of over optimization and also the easiest to recover from. When you are trying to rank for a specific phrase, you want google to find that term. Many webmasters will do this by placing the same term in the page title, url's, meta tags, body text, anchor text, header tags etc etc. It is important NOT to do this. Google will know what the subject of your site is without having to repeat the same phrase over and over. That just gives a poor user experience. Not only that, google will know you're trying to game the system. You could possibly overcome this by strong content and a good backlink profile, but it will likely still hold you back in some way or another.

It is important to use the keyword only in a natural way. I would expect the page title and H1 to have the keyword, but then using it in a second heading wouldn't normally be natural. Similarly, you can use the keyword in the text. In fact I would expect to find the keyword a few times in text. But it should only be used where it wouldn't feel pushed. Putting it in ten times with the same phrasing sure looks like keyword stuffing to me.