How many times should a word appear in an article?

[spes123]

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

[SEO5Team]

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.

[EGOL]

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 .

[MattAntonino]

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.