The Ideal Amount of Keywords:
The Once Per Paragraph Rule

The Once Per Paragraph Rule is the single most critical lesson about search engine optimization you can lean because it answers the question "What is the ideal amount of keywords?".

Each of your landing pages will need to contain an article about 750 words long on the subject of the page's keyword. (To understand why 750 words is the target, see "Britney Spears", "Sex" and "SEO") . This must be a well-written, informative and interesting article designed to make those visitors stick to your web site and not bounce away. When writing this article you need to use your exact keywords once per paragraph. This gives a high enough keyword density to do well in the search engines but low enough that it won't look like spam to either Google or the human reader.

With some keywords it is easier to do this than others. For example “Britney Spears” is easy to drop into the text and if you need to refer to her again in the same paragraph you can use “Britney” or “Miss Spears”. With other keywords it is not so easy. For example, the keyword “Acme Widget green” is extremely hard keyword to use the ideal amount. Though you can occasionally force such phrases into your text you must remember that humans will be reading what you write, not just Google. The bad grammar that arises when you force in a keyword will create a bad impression on your human readers and bounce them back to Google.

The once per paragraph rule will give you approximately the right mix of text to keywords for a web page. Obviously very short paragraphs or very long paragraphs will distort this so keep your paragraphs in the range of 75 to 150 words. Remeber to also use headings and other commonsense SEO web site design techniques that form the basis of affordable SEO.

Do not be afraid of using phrases similar to your keywords in the same paragraph as your keywords. The phrase “pictures of Britney Spears” is different from “Britney Spears pictures” from Google's point of view. Similar but different keywords do not count towards your Once Per Paragraph rule and they have a great deal of benefit. In SEO and the Long Tail we look at the long-tail in detail but using lots of variety in your language will greatly increase your incidental or Long Tail hits whilst using your keywords the ideal amount.