How Many Keywords and Tags to Add Per Post?

[Luis]

I have a blog website and I write well over 500 words per post. My home page has about 5 to 6 keywords which is fine. I don't want to look too spammy, but also want the best result for my site. I was wondering, when I write a new post or article for my site, how many keywords should I stick in there? In addition how many tags should I allow my post or article to have and not look too spammy? I wan to be able to rank good and not be penalized. If anybody has good rankings or good experience please state so. Thank you!!

[John Maddox]

You don't want to (nor is it beneficial) to go after more than 2-3 keywords per article. Google in post-Panda SEO world is looking for very quality content and giving bonus to authors that follow the rules.

A general rule of thumb is to only use keywords where it makes total sense to NOT be using something completely different. Write for humans not robots e.g. the Googlebot.

That said, when it comes to keywords you're wanting to be found for, instead of using the SAME keyword(s) string(s) over an over, just utilize synonyms, plurals, different combination etc etc of what you're wishing to be found for.

Also make sure that the keywords you're going after in your article are correlate directly with the Title Bars and other meta data of that specific page. Search engines look at this as a baseline factor. Additionally, make SURE your keyword density percentage doesn't exceed 4% of total words. Beyond this and you run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties.

Google is directly taking this into account from the perspective that it's more "natural" if there are a variety of words related to a topic being used, rather than the same ones over and over. This gives you the opportunity to be ranked for a larger number of potential search queries, as well as not breaking the rules.

Additionally, if you're wanting to also help people with links their site for SEO purposes, make sure to take "co-occurrence into account. This means having their BRAND name be the words linked e.g. the anchor text, but from a content layout of the article itself have keywords they want to be found for in relative proximity to the brand link.

Finally, in regard to the tags for the article itself, I wouldn't recommend going after more than 4-7. Make sure you use basic logic when determining what they are going to be. After all, the odds of a 500 word article being about a ton of different subjects is unlikely, therefore Google ALSO views that as unlikely.

Long and short of it is make sure you just think through things from a common sense perspective. If a fellow human would think what you're doing is strange, it's likely that Google would think the same thing.