Mike Moran from Search Engine Guide recently blogged about the appropriate amount of keywords to target per page on a website. The initial assumption would be to target as many keywords as possible, in order to build as many links as possible, but according to Moran that's not the right strategy. A lot of SEO professionals would disagree with this advice, but his perspective and explanation is interesting. In his blog below he describes the appropriate amount of keywords, the reasoning behind it and why it will end up working in your favor as a search engine optimization strategy down the line.

I'm sometimes asked this question, usually by someone savvy in search marketing. After all, it's expensive to create and optimize pages for search, so you'd want to amortize that investment over as many keywords as possible right? Actually, no. The number of organic search keywords I recommend your target per page is one. Surprised? A lot of people are, and I admit to perhaps being more extreme than some on this issue. Still, I will stick to this advice because I think it's the right way to approach the problem, even if you end up compromising later. Now, understand, it's not possible for you to optimize for one keyword without having other words on the page. I'm not advocating pages that contain one word, but I am advising you to have one primary focus on the page, one concept that the page is about. Of course, sometimes you have two words that mean absolutely the same thing. If you are trying to optimize the same page for "certified public accountant" and "CPA" then I have no issue with that–essentially they are the same word. I might also be talked into sharing landing pages between "sofa" and "couch" if you really think there is no distinction in the searchers. Obviously doing so saves time. But if you told me that you think that people who type in "CPA" are more sophisticated than those that type in "certified public accountant" and that you want to target different types of messages to those two groups, I wouldn't fight you over having two distinct pages for those audiences.