How many keywords should be ranked for the homepage?

One of my company’s clients has contracted 50 keywords for just one Web page.

The client wants to rank the 50 keywords for the homepage. I recommended not doing it, but the client insists that it’s necessary to rank all of the keywords for the homepage, and there’s no way to convince him otherwise.

Is it harmful to work this way? Could Google end up penalizing the site?

 

I'd recommend no more than 2 or 3.

Since many of the major factors in on page optimization are limited, if you're keywords are even a little competitive, you won't be able to rank well for all of them.

For example, some of the major factors are...
Keyword in the url -- obviously you're not going to put 50 keywords in your url
Meta Title -- Should only be a max of about 9 words
H1 tag -- won't be very readable if you put more than a sentence in it.

It's always a better strategy to create new pages for each couple of key phrases, that way you can create a URL, meta title, h1 tag and content that are specifically targeting that key phrase. You'll find this strategy performs better.

 

50 keywords are too much in my opinion. On-page optimization mention the use of h1,h2,h3 tags, bold, underline, etc. Also the correct keyword density is good for your site. I say that a page should be optimized for 1-2 main keywords while adding 2-3 other keywords with less priority. top optimize 50 keywords you need so many contents that it hurts the design of your site and I don't think google with appreciate it too. Also, you might tell your client that it's not possible to rank 50 keywords unless there is no competition at all.