How many keywords can I optimize my home page for?

I have a 9 year old world press site that gets decent traffic my question is what is the maximum amount of key words I can optimize my home page for? Any help or advice appreciated thanks.

depending on your niche but you can rank on unlimited keywords nowadays and they dont necessarily have to be on your home page but the keywords have to be relevent to your niche google is to smart now

there are no limitations for keyword. you can take it according to your website size. but keyword must accurate and related to your website.

According to SEO standards you can use upto 6 keywords on homepage . But based on your niche it can be allowed upto 9 keywords.

Try to optimize for your own branded keywords, will help you in the long term..

Around 5-10 keywords per page seems appropriate. What type of page is your homepage? Does it have its own content or is it like a magazine theme with links to other posts?

It's harder to optimize for homepage since URL probably will not have your keyword in it. Unless your domain has the keyword I suppose.

I've found it easier in the past to create a separate page to target keywords rather than try to optimize one page for multiple keywords.

xcodes said:

According to SEO standards you can use upto 6 keywords on homepage . But based on your niche it can be allowed upto 9 keywords.

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wat?

As Much As You Can Only Depend On Your Niche !

You can use as many as you want, but decide them as per your content size, do not stuff them.

Rather than first approaching this from "what are my keywords and how many can I rank for?", I recommend you first figure out content and sections that should appear on your homepage: Communicate what your site is about and help your visitors to navigate your content/products/whatever it is. Once you have the different sections, content and keywords will fall in place.
However, as KingZen said, it is easier to optimize on pages that are topic- and keyword-dedicated rather than on your homepage. You also do not want to "confuse" google etc. whether a dedicated page or your homepage is the best result for a user's query.