How many times to repeat the exact keyword?

[staingurus]

I'm curious what the suggested number of times is for including an EXACT keyword in a document, OTHER than in the page title, h1 and alt text? What does SEOMoz advocate for this?

Bonus credit: What is the consensus on "stop words"? I've read the the search engines ignore these, yet searching for the same query with or without them produces vastly different results... So should they not always be included in one's keyword optimization, above?

[webfeatseo]

use it naturally. i just write and dont go out of my way to stuff the keyword into the content in an unnatural way. however on a long page i would say no more than 10 times. and i mean a long page not just a couple paragraphs.

and stop words seem to depend on the context. some keywords naturally include stop words while others just have it in there depending on how a user types.

search engines will ignore to a degree

[Ben-HPB]

webfeatseo is correct, don't try to stuff the keyword as that used to work a long time ago however things have changed a ton in the last few months. Jump out to Google Keyword Suggestion tool and pull a search up for that exact keyword you are wanting to try and rank for and then build a list of other related keywords that you can pull from to build with that you can build a theme based article that readers are going to understand and want to read.

Don't worry to much about how many times you use a word focus on the content you are writing. another good tool I found when writing articles is inboundwriter also SEOMOZ has a great tool that can help you analyze the page for accuracy called **On-Page Report Card **found on the http://www.seomoz.org/tools page.

I hope this helps.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I'm not a fan of trying to stuff with keywords, but I do try and make sure they are in the URL (not always possible), in the title, description and somewhere towards the top of the page - usually an H1 or title of some sort.

If you really must try and hit a percentage, don't ever try and go for more than about 4-5% (an an absolute max).

Google tell us that in the first part of the page they should get a feeling for what it is about...

So...

• Above the line - descriptive content
• Below the line - supporting content

Andy