Hi,

In the process of going through the motions of SEO oprimisation for the first time on my site, and i'm looking at the keywords i want, and there are a lot that i want. Such as keyphrase + local town (and there are a lot say 100 or so)

I was wondering if anyone could tell me whether Google, Yahoo or MSN would class say pc repair town1, pc repair town2, pc repair town3 etc.. as a negative and what you would suggest otherwise. I was toying with creating a page for each town with its name scattered through it instead and just the keywords, but then that brings me on to my second question...

Can you have too many different keywords, let alone similar ones?

Thanks,
Adam

Yes.

In general, it's reckoned that one page can effectively support no more than two or three key phrases.

With similar keywords, it's a much more serious issue, as over-optimization is a major cause of sick site syndrome.

The simple test is to get an honest* friend to read the page. If they smile, you've overdone it. If they laugh, you've overdone it badly. With practice, you get so you can read your own pages and know what looks stupid

*honest as in they will tell the truth, not just humour you.

A site might target many thousands of keywords, but each individual page should be targetting only a small handful of those. Each page therefore covers a different topic.

Nice one cheers guys, while i'm thinking on, how do you rate the Keyword META tag?

The more I read, the more I read its dead, and that more important are the ALT, Title tags, and content content content.

Not quite dead ... and certainly not buried!

Some suggest that Yahoo! and others still take a glance - may be useful for misspellings, etc.

And though Google certainly don't use it in any significant way, that does not say that they never will.

But as with all meta tags, better not to use it than to misuse it, which could hurt.

ALT attribute, Title tags, and content content content certainly matter much, much more - but ensure that they follow protocol and are page-specific to get SEO benefit.

Content content content is an abbreviation for unique content, original content and interesting content

Thanks Quadrille,

you know i begining to feel a bit like an alchemist...

With the price of lead these days, it won't be long before the savvy alchemist is turning gold into lead!

You didn't mention the meta description in all that.

Searchers see that text as the two-line snippet in the search results. It's your best chance to say something that makes the user click on your entry and not the other nine, or ninety-nine.