Keywords on site re:- Google

[micko]

Hello,
This is my first message. I've just launched a holiday directory www.theholidaydirectory.co.uk and like everyone else would obviously like to increase my rating on Google. I would like to ask, how many keywords can you put on your homepage before you upset Google and they penalise you. I would also be intersted in exchanging links with anyone who has a holiday related site although at the moment I have no page ranking.
Mike

[cbp]

Welcome to WPW.

You can put as many as you like thats of use to your visitors and looks natural.

However, if you want to believe in the "over-optimisation-penalty", then make sure your keyword(s) has the highest density on the page, but try to keep it below ~10%.

CBP

[jestep]

I would agree with cbp. I think that I have had the best results with around 4 - 5% for key words in the body of the document, but the most important thing is that it looks good to actual people. Your selling your site to people and the search engine is just the delivery method, so make sure that it still has human appeal.

[jackson992]

I've seen lots of talk about this over optimization penalty but personally I don't believe in it. I currently have some pages ranked well with close to 20% keyword density

[cbp]

...that why I said "If you want to believe in the OOP..."

One of my pages is #1 on Google & Yahoo and its keyword density is >50% - its all natural and I tryed to get it down, but could not. HOWEVER, I do not beleive for one minute that the keyword density is the reason it ranks well (it does have lots of good incoming anchor text). It could be poosible that Google just ignores the keyword density if it gets over as certain amount, so that part is just dropped from teh relevancy formula ---- pure speculation on my part.

CBP

[Mel]

In the original "anatomy" paper the following quote is found in the section explaining how pages are ranked:

...Google counts the number of hits of each type in the hit list. Then every count is converted into a count-weight. Count-weights increase linearly with counts at first but quickly taper off so that more than a certain count will not help...

Largely because of this and the fact that keyword densities above a certain value do not appear to affect Google rankings I have always assumed this system makes the calculation of keyword percentages redundant.