SEO – Keywords Part 15
I seem to think everyday, “This tip is pretty straight forward.” When it comes to SEO, none of the techniques are rocket science. The hard part is just making sure that you get all of the little details put together. It’s like a puzzle. Look at two puzzle pieces that fit together. Taken by themselves, they’re relatively simple. Just a couple pieces of cardboard with notches cut in them. But toss them in the box, shake it up and the problem becomes a little more complex. SEO is very much the same. Each of the little pieces, by themselves, are relatively simple. Really, how hard is it to put your keywords in your headline? Or how about remembering to make them bold in your page? Not too hard either. But when you get a list of hundreds of things like that, SEO becomes as complex and time-consuming as a 1000 piece puzzle.
So for today’s topic, let’s talk about phrase order. It’s pretty straight forward.
It’s important to make sure that you try as much as possible to make your keyword phrases on your page, match the order of the words in the search query. But how will you know what people are searching for? We’ll get into that more in the next few weeks, but for now, let’s just say that you have to do your homework and do the research to discover first what people are searching for. It does you no good to build a site that’s optimized for a phrase that no one is looking for. You have to be sure that people are looking for the phrase first.
Or, you may find out with some research that twice as many people are looking for one phrase than another closely-related phrase. I see it all the time. Let’s say you’re going to make a site about cats. But after doing a little research you may find that twice as many people are looking for kittens as cats. Or maybe 4 times as many people are looking for “dogs.” If that’s the case, you may change the direction of the site. There are a lot more considerations to take into account when doing keyword research but we’ll talk more about that later.
To begin your research, just check out Google’s page where they tell you how many people are searching for each phrase last month.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
So now that you’ve looked into the most popular phrases, let’s get back to keyword order. If you see that 120 people a day are looking for “food for cats” and 276 are looking for “cat food” it only seems logical that you’d want to optimize the page for “cat food.” Mentioning the alternative phrase helps a little because the same words are still used in the phrase “food for cats” but it’s not as relevant as a direct match for “cat food.” Therefore sites that mention “cat food” more will be seen as a better match for the search query and will likely come up higher in the search results pages.
Chadd Bryant
