too many keywords or not?

[mgstudent]

Is it good practice or keyword stuffing to try and get the main keywords in as often as possible?

For example, a geo forum you might want to stress the geo name often. But would you want to name each of the forums:

geo name general chat
geo name for sale
geo name accommodation
geo name jobs

in which case your breadcrumb would look like:

Birmingham Forums > Birmingham Classifieds > Birmingham Accommodation

This will probably put the geo name in page titles and in H1 tags etc depending on the forum software...

Is this overdoing it though? If the forum is just starting there will be no other content - just these headers and forum names?

Would a breacdcrumb trail like the following be better:

Birmingham Forums > Classifieds > Accommodation

or am I missing out on a good opportunity to get people searching for "birmingham accommodation" by not listing ... > ... > Birmingham Accommodation ?


Many thanks for any help - this is a big project and so am trying to get it right at the start...

[dcristo]

Definitely include the desired keywords in the page title, breadcrumb links etc. This is not over optimisation at all, just good seo practice.

[mgstudent]

Thanks dcristo -

I just now have to get over the issue that users might be bothered that it has the geo name in every forum title. Eg "birmingham for sale forum" as a title!

From a user point of view it might be overwhelming and possibly annoying. But if the seo benefits could be big then I should probably do it.

EDIT - Another quick question.

Do you know if the following link is good for seo:

http://www.geo-town.com/geo-town-forum/geo-town-events/

or is the fact that it just leads to a directory a problem?
For example would either of the following be seen as better SEO:

http://www.geo-town.com/geo-town-for...wn-events.html (or .php)
http://www.geo-town.com/geo-town-for...eo-events.html


My forum software is pushing me toward the single link above (the open directory), just not sure if google will interpret that well for seo possibly assuming that it's an index.html page). Also the last link above is an extra directory away from the root, so not sure if this is a good/bad thing...