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Think theme, not keyword phrases |
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Think theme, not keyword phrases |
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Views: 1512
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#1
12-14-2009, 07:55 AM
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Think theme, not keyword phrases
I was reading through some articles that were submitted to my article site the other day. Some are really very good, but on the other hand, some were not.
Of the "bad" ones, the thing that struck me was how easy it was to pick out the main keyword the author was using when he/she wrote the article. Even after reading only the first paragraph, I could spot it, and my suspicions were confirmed as I continued down the article. Articles written around a main (primary) keyword often read very badly. The author tries to insert the exact phrase over and over again, even when it is not grammatically correct to do so. The article sounds forced (because it is). And my point is? Well my point here is that if I can spot this type of keyword focused content, so can a search engine. Articles written in this way are written for the search engine, not the visitor, and are therefore going to be the type of article that the search engines want to remove from their database. Remember, the search engines want to serve up the most relevant content with the best information. They will assume (as I would) that any article written purely for the search engine is not going to be of interest to a visitor. So, where does that leave us in terms of keyword research? Does this mean we should not target primary keyword phrases? Keyword research, and manipulation of keywords going into an article has evolved in recent years. When I first started out it was simple. Write content around one primary keyword and 2 or 3 secondary keywords. Insert the primary in the title, meta tags, H1 header tag, twice in each paragraph, H2 header etc etc. Insert the secondaries throughout the article. Nowadays that optimization technique would be labelled as keyword stuffing by the search engines and ranked appropriately. In fact, I would not recommend any technique that had hard and fast rules about where to insert keywords into a document. With rules, you leave footprints, and footprints are visible to the search engines. This week I read a newly released "SEO tutorial" which offered exact methods of keyword placement involving inserting exact numbers of keywords into various parts of a page. Sure it helps a writer concentrate on the objective of the article having such firm rules, but don't expect it to help your rankings. If you follow the same rules on all your content, all your content has the same footprint. Obviously keywords are important since they will tell the search engines what a page is about. Don't forget though that keywords in incoming link text is important (even more important than the keywords on a page) in the page ranking. Keyword optimization must involve both on-page and off-page strategies. Off page factors are relatively easy. Select several phrases you want to rank for, and get incoming links that include those phrases. Add more phrases into the inbound link text mix as time goes by. On-page optimization appears a little trickier. The way you should be thinking about writing content is not so much about focusing on individual keywords, but more on the overall theme of a page. When people search for stuff at the search engines, they enter a wide range of phrases, even when searching for the same information. Your job is to find all of the variations of search terms used, and pick out those words that often appear in the set of searches. Using these common words in your content will ensure that your page is themed around the topic of your main keyword. For example, if you were writing a web page about baby shower invitations, you would look for all phrases related to baby showers AND invitations. Here is how I would do it. 1. Go to Wordtracker and do a compressed search for baby shower invitation (with "number of results" set to 500). Wow, Wordtracker returns 500 results for this phrase. THat will give us plenty to work on. 2. Get Wordtracker to calculate the competition for you. Using this method of keyword harvesting, Wordtracker will only find the competition for the first 100 words, but that is OK. These 100 will be the most common search phrases in the group, and those are the ones we are most interested in (since they are the phrases that are most often typed in, and therefore can be used to most strongly theme our page). 3. Email the results to yourself. 4. Import the keywords into your favourite "keyword manipulation" tool. I use Keyword Results Analyzer, but you can use a spreadsheet if you have the relevant spreadsheet s****s. Now, you need to find the words that are most often associated with your main phrase "baby shower invitation(s)" in the queries made at the search engines. This will tell you what words are highly related to your main phrase, and therefore should be used to theme your page. 5. Order your phrases by Count, with the highest count at the top. This will put the most common phrases at the top of your list. The next step depends on how many "themeing words" you want. 6. Select the top 10 phrases. Here they are in my example: baby shower invitations baby shower footprint invitation baby shower invitation free printable baby shower invitations baby shower invitation wording free baby shower invitations free baby shower invitation baby shower invitation ideas wording guide for baby shower invitations abc girl baby shower invitations All you now need to do is make a list of all unique keywords that appear in this list. They will be the words that are most often associated with baby shower invitations searches, and therefore the best ones to use to theme your page. Fortunately KRA gives us this information in the reports: Here are the themeing words: abc baby footprint free girl guide ideas invitation invitations printable shower wording A web page that is written to include these words in the page, will inevitably be seen as a page on baby shower invitations by a search engine, since these words are most commonly found in baby shower invitation searches. Add into the mix, one or two occurrences of the exact phrase "baby shower invitation" on the page, plus inbound links containing this and other related phrases, and you will have a page that should do well for a variety of baby shower invitation queries. If you are writing a longer article, this last step can be changed to include the top 20, top 30 or more phrases. Here are the unique themeing words to use if you use the top 20 phrases instead of the top 10 as shown above: abc baby bear cheap create footprint free girl guide ideas invitation invitations pooh printable shower teddy unique winnie wording This has added a few more themeing words into our arsenal: bear cheap create pooh teddy unique winnie This can also give us ideas on different related pages that we could write. Looking at the additional phrases, it might be worth a web page devoted entirely to Winnie the Pooh invitations. Checking KRA, 5 of the 100 phrases we collected are related to Winnie the Pooh, but I am sure we could find even more at Wordtracker by searching for "pooh shower invitations". Sure enough, there were another 17 phrases found related to this phrase. Here they are: baby pooh baby shower invitations cheap winnie the pooh baby shower invitations classic pooh baby shower invitations classic pooh shower invitations classic pooh timeless memories baby shower invitations classic winnie the pooh baby shower invitations classic winnie the pooh shower invitations free printable pooh baby shower invitations free printable winnie the pooh baby shower invitations free winnie the pooh baby shower invitations pooh baby shower invitation pooh baby shower invitations pooh classic baby shower invitations the pooh baby shower invitations winnie the pooh baby shower invitation winnie the pooh baby shower invitations winnie the pooh shower invitations And letting KRA do its work, here are the themeing words for a page on Winnie the Pooh baby shower invitations: baby cheap classic free invitation invitations memories pooh printable shower timeless winnie As you have seen, selecting keywords for themeing pages is very easy to do, and just by making sure that these words are included in your page, you will be themeing your page and getting the on-page factors right, all without overly focusing on a primary keyword. All you then need to do is work on off-page factors, getting incoming links with link text rich in a range of primary phrases and themeing words. 
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