I just optimized my new home business directory for 10 keywords and I don't seem to be getting any traffic from Google which I thought was odd. Every other website I've started in the past also got at least a few visitors from the start. Do you think maybe Google favors websites that go for less keywords than 10? I'm thinking that maybe Google is classifying this as "keyword spamming".
If your site has get index by Google Seach Engine than its OK to have 10 keywords. Don't worry about keywords just build more and more quality backlinks to your site.
You need to remember that it is the Page that gets ranked and optimized, not the site. Having said that, I think it would be pretty hard to optimize a page for 10 keywords. 3 or 4 should be adequate. Zeek
A lot would depend on the competitiveness of the niche and the search volume. I assume you just don't have enough backlinks to get any rankings yet.
Rather than trying to shoot for certain keywords, shoot for a certain niche and find out what keywords best finds your site.. then work on those. Once you've reached good SERPs for that, then move onto harder keywords, and slowly build your way back to the keywords you WANT. Rather than having poor listings on 10 good keywords, have great listings on 100 poor listings, and then work your way twords the others.
Like kaash said, if its indexed then alls good- link build to raise it. If not, think about targetting some of the keywords on another page and building good links for both pages. If your site has a good internal linking strategy, linkjuice should flow between both.
The problem won't be that you have targetted too many keywords. The most common problem is targetting the wrong ones. Targetting keywords that are too competitive brings no traffic, just as targetting keywords with few or no search volume brings no traffic. It's about getting the trade off right.
3-4 keywords per page is just about that. It's better to optimize site on fewer but better keywords than more but worse..
I would recomend sticking to 3-5 keywords per page. Ten keywords would make it hard to rank for those keywords and would means it would take longer to rank for those keywords.