To be successful in SEO, you need to have a high degree of keyword clarity and need to know which market you are going to target. So, should you take a long shot on a highly popular keyword? Or just settle for a more attainable ‘long tail’ keyword? Here is the best of both approaches in one simple, focused keyword strategy.
Keyword Strategy:
When preparing your content to be “search friendly”, you must make clear keyword choices. Even Google advises webmasters to “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”
Some of the common mistakes that webmasters make when keyword optimizing:
(1) In the olden days SEO was all about stuffing pages with tons of keywords, kind of the “buckshot” approach of long-tail SEO. It just doesn’t work anymore. In fact, the only way to win a keyword, now-a-days, is by reducing the keyword stuffing; make the keyword stuffing a.k.a. keyword density or keyword saturation 3-5%.The best approach is to build links with a single consistently targeted keyword phrase per page. Sure, the keyword phrase can change over time — but even in change, consistency should be the goal.
(2) Everyone would love to come up on the first page for there own popular keyword like “health” … But it’s just not going to happen because there will be an astronomical number of people like us, with this same general, popular keyword who want to be on top. If that’s your keyword target, you’re going to get buried on page 30 of the search results — meaning almost NO traffic at all! Your new page is just getting into the game and it can take years of ethical link building to compete with the top players. In the meantime, you’ll get NO visitors for all your effort!
(3) Ok, you lowered your expectations and chose to go after traffic from a non-competitive “long-tail” keyword. Well guess what? There’s not much competition because that keyword is simply: Unpopular. Sure you can win a number one position pretty quick — and you’ll get a tiny trickle of traffic — but that’s all you’ll ever see from that keyword! Congratulations, you’re now the king of an ant hill.
A Simple but Effective Keyword Tactic:
I have one question for all you guys: How do you choose keywords to promote your niche? If you choose one that’s too popular then your site will be buried in the competition. If you choose one that’s too unpopular, your page will at best, be king of a very tiny mountain.
You know, in earlier days, keywords were selected on the basis of KEI (keyword effectiveness index) - an index which tries to determine which keywords have relatively high reward (popularity) relative to risk (competitiveness). The problem with this approach is that ALL the top keywords are highly competitive by now. It’s like trying to choose a good domain name when ALL the common-word domains have long since been taken. KEI analysis is a dead end — it simply doesn’t provide a pathway to winning over popular keywords.
But there is a way to win high-popularity keywords over time without sacrificing the immediate traffic benefits of long-tail keywords. I am going to tell you one tactic which is not black-hat or devious in any way - in fact, it’s pretty obvious after you think about it.
Start by choosing an impossibly popular keyword — this is your “ideal” keyword. Next, add additional keywords to the phrase, building out a list with each item increasing in specificity — until your last item is a three or four word “long tail” phrase of very low search popularity.
For example, instead of choosing the impossible keyword “health”, build out additional rungs such as “health checkup” and then “free health checkup”, just build a keyword ladder like this and now you will have three rungs:
(1) Health — your “ideal” keyword phrase
(2) Health checkup — your “goal” keyword
(3) free health checkup — your “initial-target” keyword
Your “initial-target” keyword phrase will be free backup software. Go ahead and target that entire phrase in your page, (remember, at 3% to 5%) site optimization and link-building. You’ll find that the three-word combination is much easier to conquer — bringing you some degree of traffic-flow right away.
Now here’s the important part: Just as soon as you get to the first page for one phrase, stop promoting that phrase! Instead, step up the keyword ladder and start promoting the next (shorter and broader) phrase.
That’s it! This technique really works — and it works just as well for your site’s home page.
