I was informed by someone in the SEO industry that google only allows 3 key phrases per page with a total of 5 phrases per site. Does that sound right?

I planned on building a website with multiple landing pages and each designed for a specific town and wanted them to support keywords for that separate town. I live near a city but do no work there nor want to. Therefore, I can't just target "Big City Real Estate" so I am trying to boost my google ranking for each of the towns I work in (of course, giving info to people as well).

If this is true, I would need multiple websites. Any thoughts?

From a strategic standpoint, a website can easily rank for hundreds of terms. From a tactical standpoint, it's probably best to choose the keywords you want to optimize for and limit the size of your net. I would say the number they picked is probably about right.

However, if they claim to know that, "google only allows 3 key phrases per page with a total of 5 phrases per site" then they've figured out something no one else in the industries knows. Not likely.

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Lydia Taylor, Realtor & Broker

Augusta GA Real Estate | North Augusta SC Real Estate | Augusta GA Home Search

Write for your customers and don't worry about it.

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That's crap. You can add more unique pages with original content each with their own key words. No doubt google picks up on themes for the site as a whole and uses that in its rankings. In this case that would be real estate. But if you can real heavy and original content about he surrounding areas on their own pages optimized with aggressive yet ethical SEO those pages will move up. I would say add new content to those pages every once in awhile so they are viewed as dynamic pages w/ fresh content. Also there may be some benefit in not completely optimizing them the first time. Interlink all your pages and on a blog link to those specific pages as they come up in your blog. Go in depth on the areas with lots of good headlines of H1-H4 on each page that deals with nuances of the area or features of the region with tons of real estate news such as market reports and trends.

You can rank for tons of terms, but single pages should limit key words phrases they shoot for. By writing a LOT of content on an area with lot internal and external links for the subjects you are writing about, you'll get noticed for the long tail searches people use on the areas they search. People usually don't just search exactly the "city state real estate" phrase. So lots of info on each page matters a lot to capture as much of the longtail searches as possible.

Be original though in what you do. It takes a lot of time...rewards can be very nice$$$$$

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Lydia - I think the only Google "experts" are those that work at Google and they're not giving up any info.

Bigtoe - I agree, write for the readers first and foremost. However, it is important to not violate any major rules due to ignorance.

jseville - I'm glad you wrote what you wrote because that is nearly exactly the strategy I was devising. I want a functional, sticky, informative, and well ranking website all in one. I want to create a blog and link it back to the website when appropriate. I'm always cautious when someone says the "know" google's rules - thanks for your comments.

that's not true at all, think about it; how many terms does a site like wikipedia come up for?
if google did that, they'd be restricting themselves..

This might be a matter of semantics or misunderstanding. Like everyone else says, you can optimize with on-page and off-page factors and get listed for hundreds of keywords. Your friend might have been trying to explain something else.

Maybe he was referring to the keyword meta tag (which is almost useless for SEO since only a few search engines support it). Maybe your expert was saying you can only put a few keywords in the meta tag.

Or maybe (more likely) he was referring to putting how many keyword phrases you can fit into the title tag. Google supports the title tag and it's very important for optimization, and they support something in the range of 68-90 characters. So it's hard to fit more than a few keyword phrases in there...

So here's what we do: we have hundreds of keyword phrases that we already rank well for or that we've already completed seo campaigns for, phases that are performing well, phrases that just aren't as competitive as some of the most popularly searched terms (terms like "city real estate" or "houses for sale in city"). We don't need to use the title tag to optimize for those other less competitive terms-- we put those top, most competitive phrases in the title tag.

For instance, if your URL is your company name, chances are that you can rank really well for your company name without using the title tag, after the first round of quality link building. And it seems to me the people are just more inclined to give you links with your company name than your favorite keyword phrase.

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Aubrey is the VP of Sales and Marketing for Trimark Properties in Gainesville, Florida. Trimark specializes in niche Gainesville Apartments and UF Housing Options for students wanting to live close to the University of Florida campus. For more information on the Gainesville apartment and rental market, check out
UF Housing: Dorms & Gainesville Apartments and the Gainesville Apartments Research blog.

Don't worry about it, if your writing about a certain topic or area in real estate the keywords come natural.

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if content is different/unique , doesn't matter.

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I think that particular SEO expert is a little incorrect or maybe you misunderstood them.

Keyword density is a tricky subject nowdays. Some feel that Google is doing something more about keyword stuffing in the changes that are currently being tested. The general opinoin I've heard is that keyword density doesn't even matter that much. Especially not as much as some think it does. Pages with lower density can still rank higher for keywords than pages with higher density. It is generally thought that inbound links from authority websites of the same or similar theme as yours with proper anchor text is the most valuable tool in ranking in SERPs. Generally, your SERP rankings will usually follow along with your allinanchor rank for a certain keyword with a couple exceptions. This is all IMO.

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