Spoke
Keyword placement
The most superstition-heavy topic in the field. Here's the small amount that holds up, and the large amount that doesn't.
Placement conventions are long-standing practice. No platform has ever published a density target or a placement specification.
This is the most superstition-laden topic in the field, so it's worth separating the small amount that holds up from the large amount that doesn't.
Where should a keyword appear on a page?
In the title, somewhere early in the opening, in at least one subheading, and naturally through the body wherever it belongs.
That's the whole convention, and it describes what a page genuinely about its subject already looks like — not a checklist to impose on one that isn't. There's no optimal keyword density and nobody has ever published one. Repeating a term past natural use is the oldest documented spam pattern there is.
Why those four
Each one is evidence from a different angle. The title is the page's claim about itself. The opening is where a reader checks they're in the right place. A subheading says this section genuinely covers the thing rather than mentioning it. Body usage is what's left over from actually writing about a subject.
Notice what they have in common: a page that's really about its topic satisfies all four without anybody trying.
That's the tell. The convention describes good content. It turns harmful the moment somebody treats it as a specification to apply to content that's about something else.
The rule that beats the rest
Clarity beats placement every time.
This used to be a real trade-off. Back when matching was literal, there was a genuine cost to phrasing something naturally instead of exactly. Systems that model meaning removed the trade. A clearly written page about a subject will match the searches it should without being contorted.
So the instruction is short. Write the sentence you'd write for a person. If the term belongs there, it'll be there. If it doesn't, leaving it out costs you nothing.
What to do instead of counting
The effort that used to go into placement is better spent on three things.
Use their words. Your audience's vocabulary, not your internal terms. This is the part of old keyword practice that survived completely, and it matters more now that people ask questions out loud.
Cover the question properly. Retrieval systems fan out across related searches, so covering the neighboring ground creates surface that exact placement never will.
Make the answer liftable. Where the page answers something, say it plainly and early.
How to tell you've failed
If you can read a page and work out which phrase it was optimized for, it's failed.
Failed for the reader, who can feel it. And failed against systems built over two decades to notice exactly that.
More in On-page & content
Headings & structure
Most people pick heading levels by how big they render. They're a document outline, and the difference shows up for exactly the readers you care about.
Internal linking
Isolated pages chasing isolated keywords lost their value slowly and then all at once. What replaced them is depth, and the mechanism is your internal links.
Titles & descriptions
These are the only part of your page most people will ever see. A decade of advice about character counts has crowded out the one question that matters.
Depth & intent
Depth is not length. It is whether somebody who arrived with a question can leave without needing another page — and intent is the thing most content gets wrong before a word is written.
Readability & formatting
Readability tools count syllables and sentence lengths and hand you a grade level. Writing to that number produces prose that scores well and reads badly.