How Many Keyword Variations Can You Have?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

When performing the on site search engine optimization of a web page, it’s best to use more than one keyword. Many webmaster use two or three – a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary. But is that the limit?

Technically, there’s no limit to how many keywords you can have on a page, but realistically, there are limits. The first limitation has to do with the human mind. How many can you manage at one time? Keep a spreadsheet, run an algorithm, or whatever. You can pile up keyword after keyword, but if you have too many keywords on one page then you’ll eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Whether anyone has ever found that point or not is anyone’s guess.

I’d caution you against trying to optimize for too many keywords on one page. If your page content is short then you only want to optimize for one, possibly two, keywords anyway. If it is longer then you can add another keyword.

Keyword variations are important because they tell the search engines more explicitly what your page is about. But too many of them and you can a chance of watering down the SEO for your primary keyword. The whole point behind optimizing a web page is to give it a focus and if you stretch yourself too wide then it defeats the purpose, so keep it thin. You are better off taking those keywords and optimizing new pages around them. You can be extremely effective if you use all of your keywords as a primary keyword on a page and as secondary and tertiary keywords on other pages. That way, you can use all of your keywords as anchor text on links that point to the page on which they serve as primary keywords for optimization.

Bottom line: Don’t try to do too much with too little. Just optimize each page intelligently and realize that sometimes too much is, well, too much. Even with keywords.