How many (repeats of desired search term) is enough?

[magic42]

I recently tried to help out a client for whom I'm designing a new web page.

I wanted to help his rankings in Google for a specific search term - "carpet cleaning city-name". (I of course put in the actual city name for "city-name". Just didn't want to list it here to respect the site owner's privacy.) The terms "carpet cleaning" and "carpet cleaning city-name" are very competitive. I changed some of the text, placed the keyword in the title, and the description meta tag, and repeated the terms "carpet", "cleaning" and "city-name" in the body text several times.

I thought this would improve the rankings, but after adding in the new terms several times, I found the ranking in Google dropping from position 9 to position 65. It ranks very well in Yahoo, however (position 5).

I wonder if anyone here has a sense of hw much os too much? I wonder of Google penalized the site for mentioning it too many times. Does Google consider it spam if a term is repeated too many times?

Anyone have any ideas on what I could do to rectify this situation?

Thanks in advance

Magic

[wyspa03]

There is no magic number I'm afraid. You might be penalized by Google for 'over optimization'.
Try to keep it natural (use your keywords in the sentences, do not single out them out from the content), use a few different variations of keywords (different order, singular and plural versions and so on). Leverage your internal linking power and use appropriate anchor.
Also, do not forget to support your on page efforts with external linking.
Cheers,
P

[Tubby]

sometimes it pays to get the whole gamet.

steam cleaning, shampoo, dust extraction, foam clean,

then the same with the city name.. we service the following districts name1 - name 2 - our contracting team calls at Morning ton each Wednesday. Afterton on thursdays - make an appointment - for steam or dry clean today.

Gert your image titled power-cleaner.gif carpet-bug.gif where search engines can read them.

search engines have a pretty good idea of what normal text looks like. .

associated words do have great value.

[magic42]

The funniest thing:

The ranking for the search term I was tracking went from around 15 to around 85th. Then, after a couple of days it went up to 8.

Now it's great!

Another funny thing: I was helping someone else with another site, and a similar thing happened. After I uploaded the new pages, the ranking also plummeted, then rose again a few days later.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say .....

[incrediblehelp]

magic dont believe in keyword density, just write for your end readers.

[fernimac]

In our SEO courses, we don't encourage the use of word density analyzers, either. We don't know how much is enough, and I personally suspect that it could be a different number for different kinds of sites. For instance, we are making the SEO of a Yellow Pages site. In this kind of sites, it is very usual that you repeat the same kind of activity combined with different locations. These pages are getting good positions and they would be over optimized from a density point of view. They don't seem to get penalized for that and it is natural that they repeat the same terms over and over.

[magic42]

Originally Posted by fernimac

In our SEO courses, we don't encourage the use of word density analyzers, either. We don't know how much is enough, and I personally suspect that it could be a different number for different kinds of sites. For instance, we are making the SEO of a Yellow Pages site. In this kind of sites, it is very usual that you repeat the same kind of activity combined with different locations. These pages are getting good positions and they would be over optimized from a density point of view. They don't seem to get penalized for that and it is natural that they repeat the same terms over and over.

That's an interesting and profund thought. Sort of like a Zen koan:

Q: What desired-keyword-density is enough?
A: Just enough!

[redspace]

I am not sure whether the term is penalize but I think google algorithm do give some impact when changing title tag , description tag and site structure. It happen to my site when I redesign and change the title tag recently. it has been one month now but the previous ranking still doesn't come back. even for my targeted keyword phrase rank high for my internal page instead of my homepage. I believe when previously your site maybe in top 100 suddenly when you change your tile tag and then your site rank top 10 maybe google put this page in sandbox for a while. My internal page with only 100 backlink in top 40 but my homepage with thousands of backlink is not in the ranking for the same keyword phrase.