Keyword quantities and positioning??

Hiya,

Im just wondering what you guys think the maximum recommended number of keywords is.
I have 16ish at the moment and the site ranks high on yahoo and msn for those keywords,
however google doesnt even flinch when it visits the site!!

Also is it safe to change the keywords? will it effect positioning at all?

Thanks

lou - try taking a look at the advanced on/off-page optimization thread. It explains a concept called "term weight" which is how search engines measure the importance of a specific keyword or phrase on a page. This would probably be the most appropriate method to determine what numbers of kws to use.

Hi,



Well I will try to answer our question as it’s not clear as to what “keywords” you’re talking about.



1) If you are talking about the META tag keywords then this is your answer:



Google hasn’t used the keyword meta tag for along time, now as for Yahoo it also doesn’t rely on this tag to help ranking. Its worth having as there are still several major/useful search engines that use this information.



As for changing this information to new keywords you can do this without worry of being affected on Google or Yahoo positively or negatively.



2) If you are talking about the keywords that you have on the page and that you are targeting to that page then this is your answer:



The search engines rank you based on your keywords pointed to your site, where Google and Yahoo differ is Google doesn’t give much weight to on site link structure where as Yahoo will use the on site link structure to help determine your keywords to be found under.



So if your not getting ranked well in Google is could be that you don’t have enough external links pointed to your pages with the keywords in the link that you want to be found under.



If you change your onsite keywords and the site linking structure you will affect your ranking within Yahoo for the keywords you had as they will slowly drop off the search results and the new keywords will be ranked higher.



If you think you can better target other keywords you can instead of deleting the old keyword pages just build new pages targeting the new keywords. This will not only help keep the old ones it will help with the new ones as there will be more pages/links pointed to these new pages.



I hope that helped and answered your questions.

- yes I did actually mean meta keywords.

Thanks for all of your advice though,- it will definately help!

Cheers!