Is it best to optimize your site for just one or two keywords?
-
My company/website makes and sells a product that's not that competitive but still has about 20 key words/phrases that people search for. My site is not a huge site maybe 35 pages after you include the blog posts.We sell samples off the site but it's mostly used as a brochure but we also want it to be a successful tool at bringing in leads.
Should I optimize for the most popular key word phrases focusing on only one or two per page and forget about the rest or should I try to optimize for as many keywords as possible on all pages or should I optimize for just the few (3-5) heavy hitting keywords but on all pages?
Right now I've got it optimized for around 3 keyword phrases for the whole site and only 1 or 2 per page with the most popular phrases on the most important pages.
-
Thanks guys. All of this is a big help. I believe what I've done is pretty close to what everyone is saying. I may need to add a few pages to the website and I'll be sure to add some posts optimized with extra terms.
-
Great. Checked it out and it helped.
-
Before I build a site, or when I do SEO on an existing site, I do keyword research to find all of the terms that I think will be important for my business. Important means: keywords that will bring in valuable traffic.
Then I develop a content plan that will produce one or two pages for every one of these important keywords and at least two pages for the most important. These keywords match to products that we sell, services that we offer, information that customers might need, general information that anyone interested in our topic niche might be searching for.
In a small niche the goal is to get pages into every important SERP.
Then there is the long tail.... for that I try to develop detailed articles with substantive content that has a diversity of potential search terms and images that could go into image search.
-
Rand had a FANTASTIC flowchart to answer this question: Splitting Keyword Targeting
It was from this post.
-Dan
-
I have always found it difficult to try to optimize for more than a few keywords/phrases per page. Most times I will target one per page if at all possible, using content marketing (blogging) to optimize for others, even writing multiple articles about a keyword to gain authority in it.
I am not saying it's impossible, many factors would determine that, like competition, etc... I just personally think it's easier (all the way around) to limit the number of keywords per page...
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best Way to Handle Multi-Language Sites
In the last year we've made a few significant changes to the structure of our site - namely adding translations for a few languages. We have historically been gaining in organic search by about 10% each month, but in the last two months we've leveled out and seen a slight dip. I am wondering if this has something to do with the addition of the second language, and namely if there's a chance we've been penalized due to duplicate content. We have almost all pages / content on the site translated by a translator, but the way the development works the site will grab the english version if a translation hasn't been added - potentially adding some duplicate content? The URL structure remains the same, other than the addiion of the language - site.com/our-tour vs site.com/de/our-tour We also haven't translated the tour name itself, so that remains the same. Just wondering if anyone has any feedback on best practices here or things I should be looking out for. Thanks in Advance.
On-Page Optimization | | mkgreyound1 -
Best site Template, Structure, etc. for SEO
If I were to spin up a new site what do people recommend as the best template, services, etc. Do you have an example of the perfect structure, I want to point my team to an example page and say - This is perfect, do this but for our product (structure, content amount, etc) Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | Jamesmcd030 -
Best way to optimize a website for local search today?
A real estate agent client has had a website for years, which he optimized to position himself as a national real estate expert (to get more TV and media exposure). Now he wants to be found for a more local real estate term, such as Westchester ny real estate. Should he add a page to his site that's focused on Westchester real estate, or would Google view that as spammy? Should he update older blog posts with relevant, useful content about Westchester? Any best practices and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | JimMartinSF0 -
New jobboard: Can redirecting folder (site.com/jobboard) to subdomain (jobboard.site.com) hurt SEO?
Hi there, I'm planning to implement a jobboard on my website which needs to be installed on a subdomain (jobboard.site.com) but I'd really like to use site.com/jobboard for promoting this jobboard (jobboard collects external industry jobs). Are there any possible disadvantages when I set up a 301 redirect from jobboard.site.com to site.com/jobboard? Also: What if I want to move this jobboard to a unique domain one day (e.g. jobboard-industry-xy.com), Would that be tricky (as I'd basically have to redirect the folder-to-subdomain redirect to an external domain and therefore get a folder-to-subdomain-to-external-domain redirect...)? Cheers, Thomas
On-Page Optimization | | stl990 -
One or two keywords/pages
Hi, I have a question about good keyword practice. I have a page: http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league It lists all injuries ("skader" in danish) and suspensions ("karantaener" in danish) for the english premier league in football/soccer. On the page one can choose to show only injuries OR suspensions, which have their own URLs: http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league/skader http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league/karantaener My question is - what is best. To optimize the first URL (the more general one) to fit both of the following keywords:
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang
"skader premier league" and "karantaener premier league" OR should i focus on optimizing the two latter URLs, the more specfiic to target the two keywords. Regards, Rasmus0 -
Altering site structure
I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site. Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner. Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered. The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense. The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category. I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong. What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages. Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Allstar1 -
Site Wide Link
I have just run up the link explorer on my site and discovered that every page home page link points back with the text home - I assume this is bad in terms of SEO , my site name is ccie and I assumed that it put the site wide link of ccie to the entire site, however it seems to be the breadcrumb default of home which is doing it/. www.rogerperkin.co.uk/ccie Should I be looking to change this so my top keyword points back from each page to the home page. I am running wordpress and assumed the site name was the home link on all pages. Can anyone advise the best practice? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | rogerp0070 -
Internal linking best practice
See example: car rental - sedans - bmw car rental - sedans - audi car rental - sedans - ford (internal links to sedans - audi, ford) or (internal links to suv - bmw) car rental - suv - bmw car rental - suv - audi car rental - suv - ford (internal links to suv- audi, ford) or (internal links to sedans- bmw...) Should I cross link only between the product page under each category or can I link between different products under different categories? From a user point of view, I think it will give him more options if he wants to choose the same brand but a bigger vehicle although I have read numerous posts saying that we should be internally linking most of the time within the same category. User experience or SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | echo10