How many times should a word appear in an article?
-
Hi
My site is maily about growing fruit and vegetables and was badly hit after the September Panda update.
Each page is about one type of fruit or vegetable and discusses how to grow that particular plant. Each page targets two keyword phrases, "growing abc" and "how to grow abc" so e.g. "Growing garlic: a guide on how to grow garlic" would be the page title and then the two phrases used a couple of times on each page.
However the plant, in the above example "garlic" can appear upto 30 or 40 times per page, also the phrases "how to grow" and "growing" will appear on just about every page, would these facts be hurting my overall site rankings?
Many Thanks
Simon
-
Worse than using a keyword 30 times in a very long article would be using it twice redundantly in the title of the article.
"Growing garlic: a guide on how to grow garlic"
Your garlic article does contain 1250+ words, including garlic 30 times. Your title includes it redundantly. The question you really need to know the answer to is: "how do the top sites rank well for this without putting it in the article 30 times?"
http://www.greenharvest.com .au/Plants/Information/GarlicGrowing.html
This is one of the top results here in Australia. It uses the word garlic about 25 times and ranks very well despite having garlic on page very frequently.
<title></span><span>Garlic growing information</span><span></title>
^ Their title also contains the word, but just once.
So, I would focus more on the structure of each page and less on the keyword density. I don't think you're overdoing the density, although the repeated title may hurt you.
-
I write naturally and don't worry about how many times a keyword is used in an article. In a long article that is thousands of words long the keyword can appear dozens of times.
If you are not stuffing keywords you should have nothing to worry about .
-
Simon,
Stick with relevancy. If it reads well on a page then you're ok however if you are using the keyword 30-40 times chances are that it does appear to be spammy for those keywords. I'd recommend rewriting the content so the main key phrase is used 2-3 times depending of course on the length of the content. Be careful with the on site optimization as well as alt tags and internal links . Dont over use them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How/when do you trim your article pages?
Hi all, I wanted to ask what have you all done to your article section that has made a difference to the site's SEO performance? What's the criteria for deciding which articles top cut or 301 redirect to the main page For example: 1. you have a slightly irrelevant article to your website topic, low conversions, but a lot of quality links to page, but no primary keywords in article title. 2. You have a slightly irrelevant article to your website, low conversion, but a lot of quality links AND you have your site's primary keywords in article title 3. You have a relevant topic to the site, but low engagement and low conversions Thanks for all your help!
On-Page Optimization | | SDavis111 -
Auto loading articles ?- best practices
Hi all! In the past months I see more and more website that doing 'auto loading articles in scrolling' - can you tell me if it's okay for SEO and what are the best practices for this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer1 -
Product Landing page- Key Words used too often.
Hi There to everyone. I'm very new at SEO so I appreciate all the help I can get! Question: on my e-commerce website, one heading is "USB KEYS", then when you click on that, you get a page full of products with the word "USB KEYS" on the title, such as "4gig black USB KEY".. So then I do the MOZ Page grader and get a low score because on the product landing page it thinks I've used the word "USB KEYS" too much, like 72 times,.. But I have to use it- Cause it has to be in the product title! Is this ok!? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | cowhidesdirect0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. So, my SEO team has worked very hard to finally resolve RogerBot/GoogleBot specific Crawl Errors either manually or programmatically can be fixed for our Budget Blinds USA Pro Campaign. We've done a good job even if a lot of it came from Robots.txt file entries as this was the most efficient way our client chose to do it. Good news is most of it is CMS configuration and not bad site architecture. That being said our next big volume of Crawl Errors is "Too Many On-Page Links". Our Moz DomainRank is 61. Our client, on this new version of the website, added a large nav-based footer which has duplicate links from the Header Main Navigation. I believe our solution is to put in No-Follow Metatags at the Footer Link Level, so we don't zap Page Authority by over-dividing as you recommend. Is this the best way to resolve this? Is there any risk in this? Or is a 61 DomainRank high enough for RogerBot and GoogleBot to crawl these anyway? Please advise,
On-Page Optimization | | Aviatech0 -
Increase of Key Word density when adding related products
Dear SEOMoz Community, By means of this message I hope you can clear something up for me. Let's say you have optimized the content of a specific page (You are an E-Commerce company) on +-2 key words. And on that page you add eight related/similar products. How do you coop with the increase of the key word density? Thanks in advance, Martin
On-Page Optimization | | Onlinedesignmeubel0 -
Two Word Company Name (Combined to One) & SEO
Hi All, I'm dealing with a company that has a two word name like "GreatCompany". They rank #1 for that but not for "Great Company". The phrase is not super competitive, but obviously they are not writing the company name with two words anywhere on their site. Has anyone had to deal with something like this? Thinking about creative solutions but I'm fairly sure we're going to need to use the name both ways to have an effect here (or use PPC to augment) but I don't really love the idea of doing that... will feel very odd and inconsistent for visitors. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv0 -
I have home tab in 2 menu's which calls the same hompage article. How do I get over this
I am getting duplicate content for this article. I need 'home' tab on two menus.
On-Page Optimization | | rajendraksh0 -
SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links, however most of them are comments...
Is this affecting the overall ranking of the page? http://www.smileclinic.sk/zubne-implantaty/ (164) http://www.smileclinic.sk/zubne-korunky/ (179) If so how can I disallow them? We use Wordpress with the Joost SEO plugin, but I don't see a disallow option there for comments...
On-Page Optimization | | danielshaw0