Hello,

I am trying to optimize my poker site and have a question about keywords:

All the guides recommend using around 10 keywords per page and to avoid keyword stuffing. If I take my home page as an example, I currently use the following keywords:

"poker leagues,poker league,poker games,poker game,find poker,home poker,manage poker league,poker videos,poker galleries,live poker,local poker,poker league software,join poker,poker groups,homepoker,online poker league,start poker,host poker,poker leauges,poker legues,find THNL"

1) Is this keyword stuffing as I use "Poker League" and then "Poker Game" (should I use "Poker League,Game" instead? Does the search engine know that "game" is in the context of the main keyword ("poker"?).

2) How do plurals work? Do I have to put
"poker league,poker leagues" in case someone types either of these into Google? Or should I use the smallest set which is "poker league" which exists in both of my keywords and would trap "poker leagues" too?

3) How do repeated keywords work? For example, I want to have "find poker" (incidentally, PokerDIY ranks number 1 in the world for this phrase). I then have a legitimate reason to use "find poker games,find poker groups,find poker leagues" - but is that keyword stuffing? How should I do it?

4) I am assuming that a keyword (as in, have 10 keywords) is 10 phrases - or is it single words only? I hardly ever use single words.

I'd appreciate any help on the above...

Just replying again so that I will hit 200 posts ;)

Your question was about the keywords for your homepage, and I agree that it is difficult - becuase for your home page you want to rank for all your main terms.  Whereas an internal page, will only have a small number of terms that you need to rank for.

So, what to do on a home page? If you put lots of different terms then the page becomes diluted, and doesnt rank as well.  Thats probably where the "10 keywords per page comes in" - the more targetted your page is, the easier it is for Google et al to know what the page is about. 

So the first thing I would suggest is to cut down on your list of terms - but for every term you cut, make sure that there is another strong page that will target that term specifically.  Then use the keyword style described by SEOmoz for the remaining terms: eg instead of poker this, poker that, poker home, poker league - make it more like real english.  And put it in your meta description, not your meta keywords :)

JK.