I have said probably too much on this topic, ok, it’s kind of important. You have a site your optimizing, you need to do some serious keyword research. I have heard so many varying perspectives, but too many people really don’t put enough emphasis on what your keywords are, where you research for those keywords and how to page map (page map=to map those select primary and secondary keywords with their respective related pages)
I know, Yahoo is the only search engine that looks at the Keywords meta tags, so who cares, well you might want to just include those specific one to three keywords you are optimizing that page for in your keywords meta tag only. This way you know exactly what this page should be optimized for - what that specific relevant term or terms your targeting are clear for site side and off site link building efforts as well.
There have been a number of conversations over the last week about keywords, should you duplicate them? Should you just use high search volume terms? The answers, in my opinion and in my experience are, no and no.
Duplicating makes zero sense, why do I want to target multiple pages for the exact same keyword? What page do I expect to see come up in the SERPs? Well, some might argue, who cares they are relevant they should all show up in top results. So, that would mean that you have many multiple pages with non-unique content - what is different about those pages?
As for looking soley at high search volume - what?? Are you serious? Ever hear of possibly too broad or not relevant enough? What is the competition of those keywords? Even if your working for a very well known site, i.e. Xerox and your targeting “document management” a nice non-branded term, (some could argue this is branded - as their tag line, but you get my point), they should own this term and by the way, they don’t show up anywhere in the top 10 results in Google - pretty interesting. Well, there are over 55 million results with this phrase in Google’s index - however Xerox is a pretty big powerhouse of a brand - if they wanted to own this phrase, they likely could with some smart SEO and optimization around that phrase.
Also, let us not ignore some good anchor text for our link building efforts. Selecting those quality relevant keywords - targeting our deeper internal pages will always win in the end.
So there you have it, select your keywords with some intelligence, logic and reasoning - don’t need to duplicate across your site, don’t need to seek out only those with very high search volume, and what are those keywords your company “must own” but aren’t, i.e. Document Management - hello Xerox?
And lastly, use the keyword meta tags for your tracking purposes - it does help.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Thanks for the great insight and info. I love the hello Xerox. I had to go and take a look at their source page.. too funny. I agree with you in regards to tracking…. amazing how much one can learn about their users and the traffic they generate. Again thanks for the wonderful info.