Are Keywords Dying?
-
I'm freelancing in SEO work, looking to make it a full time career, and as a result I'm juggling the prospect of having to pick and choose what area I spend most of my time on when working on client sites.
My background is in writing so I always lean towards creating content and engaging people via social media. But the standard is also to optimize page titles and - at a deeper level - descriptions for each page.
For larger sites, especially e-commerce with many product pages, this is a daunting task. Is it worth it or is the better strategy to focus the limited time available to content creation? Will page titles, etc. eventually become obsolete anyway?
-
This is an advantage of being in-house, I think. When our buyers add new product lines, the spreadsheet of products goes through me and I give the names and descriptions a once-over to make sure they seem sensible and searchable. It's very rare that I actually take the time to optimize title tags -- really only on high-margin items with potentially high search volume. Then the products are uploaded and it's right from the start. As for going back to optimize products that have already been uploaded, that's a daunting task when you're staring down thousands of products. I'd only prioritize that if the product pages aren't getting any traffic whatsoever.
-
For large ecommerce sites you need to incorporate automation into the process and dynamically generate optimized title tags, urls etc. everything has to line up. without good tags and urls good content will have less of a chance of ranking. Content creation is not an SEO job that is something you set strategy on and pass to a copywriter.
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
-
Huge difference between GSC ranking and browser ranking for certain keywords: How to proceed?
Hi, There is a huge ranking difference between the GSC and browser for our primary keyword. As per GSC, our ranking is around 15 and when checking on the multiple different incognito browsers it's around 50. How to handle this? Which is the accurate one? Product expert from Google forums claim that what I see on browsers are the personalized results; but I tried on different browsers with different connections. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How to formulate keyword in language that has cases and foreign characters
Hello everybody, this is my first but foremost headache causing question that i can't seem to find answear to for a month already. I live in Lithuania - small eastern European country and my native language has all "fancy" things that one could probably immagine (tenses, cases, compound forms, foreign letters: ąčęėį..., genders, declensions etc.) The problem is: how to formulate keywords correctly for my SEO to get the best results? I'll try to explain my problem in detail by using few different cases on the same aspect: 1. If i'm using keyword in nominative case which is "atvirkštinis stogas" (reverse roof eng.) - i usually can't follow all of the recommendations for SEO: add keyword in topic, follow the keyword rate in text, because the same keyword will be repeated for numerous times but in many different forms because of the nature of language itself i.e. genitive case - "atvirkštiniam stogui", locative - "atvirkštiniame stoge". Even MOZ page analysis doesn't recognize these cases as the same keyword. How about Google? Searching for keywords in different cases also gives slightly different results - some websites drop by 5 - 7 places on google searchpage No.1. Possible solutions: a) Formulate all keywords in text by using only nominative case which would totaly limit writer to a first-former kid writting capabilities and result in nobody reading the text at all. b) Formulate keywords according to mostly used keyword in text, which would affect organic search because everybody is searching for keywords in nominative case. Note that everybody here in Lithuania usually use the nominative case in search window on google. 2. The use of foreign letters (ąčęėįšųž). If we use the same keyword "atvirkštinis stogas", we have only one letter "š" that is causing a problem.
Algorithm Updates | | StatybosMarketingas
In normal texts we use all of these letters, HOWEVER, nobody is ever writting these letters while searching for keyword in google, so normally they would search for "atvirkstinis stogas" with "s" instead of "š". If you search for these two keywords "atvirkštinis stogas" and "atvirkstinis stogas" you also get slightly different results. Possible solutions: 1. Use keyword with foreign letters and have perversed search results, because everybody will still search for keywords without them. 2. Use keyword without foreign letters which will affect SEO and tell me that I don't have any of my keywords in text, topic, url, etc. Any ideas on how to solve these puzzles? 🙂0 -
Keyword Targeting - How to Properly Target Two Similar Terms?
Hi all, So I have a question about "best practices" when you have two unique, but highly similar keywords you are targeting. Let's use the examples of "raincoats for women," which gets 9,900 searches a month, and "rain jackets for women," which gets 4,400. I am in the process of selecting keywords for my client's "keyword portfolio" and need to come up with a strategy when faced with two similar keywords that use different terminology. I'm well aware that there should only be one page for "women's raincoats" but there is no doubt in my mind that Google will give preferential treatment to whichever version of the keyword (raincoats/rain jackets) I include in my title tag, meta description, content, etc. I know that the modern philosophy is that Google is sophisticated enough to understand that the two words are essentially synonymous. That said, would you A) only pick "raincoats for women" for your client's keyword portfolio and focus exclusively on that term in your optimizations? b) pick both terms and try to strike an even balance between both in your optimizations? c) pick both terms and only optimize for "raincoats for women" and hope that "rain jackets for women" gets some peripheral benefit from your optimizations via Google's understanding of synonyms? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | FPD_NYC0 -
Losing rank to Scholarly Articles and Keyword Description Stuffing
I began reviewing the rankings this week and noticed that many of our #1,#2, etc rankings had been bummed down as a whole. After reviewing many of the search terms it seems Google has begun to rank a group named Scholarly Articles in the #1 position. Has anyone else noticed this change? Secondly, many of the rankings we have lost are due to some competitors stuffing their descriptions with keywords. #1 Rank Description Failure Analysis; Scanning Electron Microscopy & EDS Analysis. Paint Chip Analysis and Evaluation; Paint Tests Physical Testing of Paints. #1 Rank Description NACE certified coatings inspector, paint inspector, coating inspector, coatings inspector, lining, failure analysis, survey, corrosion, rust, evaluation, testing, expert Is this a possible glitch occurring with the new humming bird release and has anyone else noticed an issue like this? It dropped our #1 ranks from 37 to 23 overnight. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | ChazSztroin0 -
Keywords in Footer
Do keywords in the footer carry the same weight as keywords on the rest of the page? Should we avoid having some keywords in the footer?
Algorithm Updates | | bloomnation0 -
Is my page footer the reason keyword rankings have dropped?
Hi all, One of my sites http://henstuff.com/ has seen some ranking drops for major keywords over the past few weeks and I was wondering if it was something to do with Penguin not taking a positive view of link-filled footers. It is something we are looking at phasing out but wanted to get the opinions of the SEOMOZ community. Thanks! Rob
Algorithm Updates | | RobertHill0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0 -
Major Slipping of highly important keywords in a few days
Realized some major slipping on some of my most important keywords- mn realtors and minnesota homes for sale- my site is joeandcindy.com After months of working on traffic, blogs etc, wondering what could slap me 10-25 spots in just a few days. There were no errors showing up on the report that I can see. Just looking for some quick advice on what I might be missing and some quick action steps I might take to reverse the trend. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | jjwelu0