15 February 2022

How Many Times Can A Keyword Be Used In A Blog Post.

By Rahul Garg

One of the first lessons we learn when doing SEO of our blog posts is to use a healthy number of keywords within the article. Search engine algorithms are created such that they consider the keyword density in an article. The better the density, the better chances that article will rank higher for that particular keyword. However, we have also read from many SEO engineers and SEO blogs that using too many keywords in a single article can affect the SEO negatively. Since Google and other search engines consider too much stuffing of keywords in an article as unnatural and blacklist the site or page as spam. This is why it is important that we as bloggers understand the ideal times a particular keyword can be repeated within a post.

Table of Contents

Factors that affect the decision for number of keywords:

The length of the article: The length of the article is the most decisive factor when it comes to deciding how many times a keyword can be used. If you are writing a post with only 200 odd words and when you are writing a post that is 1000+ words – there will be a significant difference in the number of times the keyword is used in the latter and former cases.
The nature of keyword: Are you optimizing your article for a short-keyword or a long-tail keyword? This is another question. It is much easier to repeat short-term keywords in an article compared to a long-tail one. However, long-tail keywords are less difficult to optimize since they have comparatively lesser competing pages.

So how many keywords can be used?

Finally, we have to decide how many keywords can be used. For this there are many answers that are provided by search engine experts. Some search engine engineers claim that the ideal percentage of keywords present in an article should hover around 5-7%. A 10% usage of keywords means that in a 1000-words article, 100 words are dedicated to your keywords only. Now this seems like a very low ratio, but practically implementing you will find that using 10% of keywords in an article makes it really keyword dense. If you can stuff the keywords smartly – then use the percentage. If not it will make the readers feel like they are reading some kind of a monotonous and repetitive slogan.

My best tip to maintaining an ideal keyword density:

The best way to maintaining an ideal keyword density is to follow the Inverted Pyramid. By using the inverted pyramid technique while writing an article, what you do is that you have a lot of keywords in the beginning of the article and it keeps reducing as you come to the end of it. This is especially effective because it caters to all the SEO principles we are used to applying such as:

We all know that keywords used in the first line (beginning) of any article is much more valuable than the text in the footer. This is similar to the reason why links in the footer are given lesser weightage from Google as compared to links between the post or right in the start. The reason why Google gives less priority to footer links of an article is because that is usually the format of article directory sites and Google has tailor made its algorithm accordingly so that no site gets popular through rampant article submission to high Pagerank directories.
Keywords are also unevenly distributed when you use keywords with the Inverted Pyramid technique. This way the crawlers will find your post is not involved in any kind of keyword stuffing and will pass it as legit and good content.

A final tip

There is really no objective way to say how many keywords one can use in an article. But ideally, it should be enough to get the attention of search engine spiders but not such that it deteriorates your visitors reading experience. The number one disadvantage of repeating keywords is that your readers will find your article very very boring and frustrating to read.