Throughout the 18 years that I have created content for businesses, I have heard the same requests from clients over and over:

Put these three keywords in the text at least five times.

Or

These keywords MUST be used twice in the opening paragraph, once in the middle and once at the end of the article.

Or

This list of 30 keywords must appear at least once in the article.

If you've been guilty of saying this to a content creator or have committed these travesties to your own content you need to hang your head in shame. Once upon a time, keyword usage and placement was important. It isn't anymore. In fact, you don't really need to worry about keywords very much at all.

Sure, you should find out what keywords your customers are looking for and then create some content for those keywords, but there is no set amount of times you need to mention the keyword. You certainly SHOULD NOT force a bunch of keywords into the same blog post, webpage or article. Search engines are penalizing big time for keyword stuffing and content that doesn't make any sense.

The biggest reason why you don't need to stuff keywords is because search engines are now smart enough to know what your post is about. Even if you don't use a specific keyword, Google will still know what your post is about and will still rank it. How your post ranks is much more about the site it is being posted to, how many social media shares it gets and backlinks.

Here's what you should do with every post:

• Put the keyword in the title.

• Put the keyword in the article at least once, but make sure the sentence still makes sense.

• Pick a relevant photo for your content and put the keyword in your photo's file name and description.

• Include the keyword in the content's meta description.

That's it. You're done. No need to do anything else with the keyword. Most of this will come about naturally, so you probably don't need to think about it too much.

Now, make sure your content is interesting and helpful to your readers because no amount of keyword play is going to help you if you overlook quality content.