Someone asked me via my email address (paul@convertingcopy.com) specifically how many keywords should they target when beginning on a new site. If the niche is small and only has a small handful of opportune keywords (see what is a good keyword) then it’s not an issue. However if you’re jumping into a large niche which has dozens or even hundreds of potentially valuable keywords for you to target, then you’re confronted with the problem of how many keywords per page to target at once.

How Many Keywords Per Page

In the past I’ve talked about how to do keyword research to get your initial set of keywords as one of the most important things to do before entering a new niche. When you’re new or even have been around for awhile in online marketing, you may go after any and all keywords you find in a niche both low competition in hopes of ranking for them right away as well as higher competition keywords for the greater search volume associated with them.

The problem with going after too many keywords right away is that you spread yourself out too thin. Remember that you should base each page of your site around a specific keyword, so the more keywords you target, the more pages you’ll create and consequently the more links you’ll have to create or earn to get those pages to rank.

Keep in mind that for every new keyword you’re targeting, you’re creating exponentially more work for yourself so it’s important that you don’t overextend yourself, otherwise you won’t be able to rank for any of the keywords you’re targeting.

Ultimately it boils down to how much time you have got to rank for those keywords. Obviously if you’re targeting multiple niches and have multiple websites or have another job or something else in your life which keeps online marketing as just something you do in your spare time, you should limit yourself to just a handful of keywords.

No matter how much time you have, you should also prioritize the keywords you want to target and rank for from a large list if you have too many choices. Focus on the keywords which are more likely to convert and turn into sales; the keywords which are more relevant to your business and areas of expertise and are most targeted for your customers.

You can try running a few of them through Adwords to gauge their commerciality quickly. To see if they’re worth your time before committing to them through painstaking SEO only to find out later when you’re finally ranking well for them that they weren’t worth your time and are not converting in the way that you would have liked.