On Page Keyword Density and Placement - Laser Targeting the Keywords
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When planning which keywords to target on a page, a plan of action should be the first step. Be sure to choose only one or two at most two keywords for the focus of your efforts. In highly competitive keyword situations, no more than one keyword should be the topic on any page.
Keep the long term goal in mind of ranking high for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. To score highly for that selected search term, a concentrated effort is essential. Think one keyword, with accompanying phrase, maximum for each page. In a competitive search field, the single keyword approach is the only one worth employing, if you want to rank well at all.
The site's home page and internal pages should have slightly different focus, but they should be created with the overall goal in mind. This is especially important for highly competitive keyword situations. Often a series of pages, each one supporting the others in an overall theme, is necessary to provide added keyword power. Since low, medium, and highly competitive keyword conditions require differing strategies, they need individual consideration.
For lower competitive search terms, there is no real need to concentrate a page's entire effort on a single keyword. In fact, it might not be the best practice in that case at all. A website owner can target two or even three low competition keywords on a page. With few webmasters targeting those search terms, the page can be focused on all of them, ensuring the page be found by many different searches. Of course, not all keywords are that easily optimized.
Moderately competitive keywords comprise perhaps the largest category of search terms. A helpful practice, in the case of medium level difficulty keywords is to use them all on the home page. By placing the keywords front and center on the website's home page, they become the focus of several themes on the site.
Each targeted keyword should then be provided with individually linked and theme clustered internal supporting pages. By providing additional theme and topic related pages, the keywords are given extra support, and overall on and off page density.
For highly competitive keywords, a much more concentrated effort must be applied to the highly sought after search term. In heavy competition, only one keyword per page may be targeted. Any more than that, and the page's keyword focus is lost. The entire effort of that page must be on that one all important search term.
Many additional focused pages, perhaps even starting on the path to an authority site, must also be created to support that highly competitive keyword as well. The object is to create a powerful website theme built around that single keyword. Anything less, and the site will not be able to compete for that term at all.
Regardless of the level of competition, it's a good idea to become dominant in as many search terms within the site's topic as possible. Once top search rankings are achieved with an important keyword, move to the next one. The more keywords are controlled, the more paths are available to enter the website, resulting in huge increases in visitor traffic.
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