Optimum Words on Home Page

[Boodreaux]

Is their an optimum number of total words for your home page?  How many keywords should one attempt to get ranked on that one page if your website is new?  If your content is graded at a post-graduate level how many times is the maximum # to mention your key word or words for SEO.

Thank you,

[AlanMosley]

Its not the number of words or keywords, but if it is natural. just write the content as you think is best for the user and you will do fine.

make sure you do get the keyword in there of cause but dont worry about how many times. Make sure you have the main keyword in the title. and at lesast once in the text.

you can  go for more then one keyword if they are simular without making the content seem un-natural, mostly you go for one keyword per page.

Dont keyword stuff is the main thing

[Boodreaux]

Alan,

If the key word is in the document 20 times and sounds natural is that better than 1 time? I keep hearing people saying optimize for your keyword and I heard one source say not to put your keyword more than 30 times.

[AlanMosley]

well i wopuld like to see it more than once, and i think 30 times would be hard to see happaning naturaly.

but if 30 times or 50 times was how it works out naturaly then i would not worry, Search engines are much smarter than counting words, they can tell if text is natural or not.

They look at the text and try to work out what the page is about, having the keyword repeated is not how they work this out, they do by looking at supporting words and their context. this is hard to fake, so thats why i say write naturaly and you will do fine, try to fake it and it will show.

70% of vists dont come from your main keywords, they came from long tail searches that you can not predict, but if you write natualy you will do well in long tails queries also.

It has been proven that thee is no such thing as keyword density or keyword count, i once like all SEO's used to think like that, but i learnt that SE's are looking for natual text, so thats what i give them.