Do pages with irrelevant keywords hurt the domain overall for ranking for relevant keywords?
-
I have been doing SEO for the University I work at. We are optimizing our degree pages on a page-by-page basis. So hypothetically we have a page optimized for "online accounting degree" and another for "online marketing degree", etc. Although our focus is on specific page optimization, we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree".
First of all, is this a reasonable expectation?
Second, if this IS the case, will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy? For example, our registrar and financial aid PDFs that are full of legal/financial mumbo-jumbo. Are these lowering our keyword density of relevant keywords across the domain?
-
I agree, potential students will likely be searching for specific degrees by academic field.
The page that is optimized for "online degrees" will be the page that high schools, businesses, other universities and education portals will be linking to most often. When these programs are marketed the marketing materials could invite links to this specific page.
-
I would bear in mind that most people who are serious about undertaking an online degree are likely to search for an online degree in a specific field - Online Marketing Degree etc, rather than the very vague 'Online Degree', so I would target one main keyword (and related keyword variations) per page/discipline.
Potential customers who are further down the buying funnel will use more specific searches to find exactly what they want - afterall, they will know that a search for online degree will bring out LOTS of irrelevant results and not deliver what they are looking for - so they drill down using the long tail keywords.
Take a look at The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Revised-Updated-Business/dp/1401309666/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308771559&sr=1-2
You will also stand a better chance in the SERPS targeting the longer tail keywords.
It's easy to get blinded by numbers in SEO and it is very easy to all end up chasing the same keywords - when they might not be the best converting keywords - I have spent some years doing exactly that and it is only in recent years that I changed my tactics and started pursuing 'more of less' and as a consequence improved the performance of my online business considerably.
If by 'irrelevant keywords' you mean the words that occur naturally when discussing your subject area then it is absolutely not an issue if you provide quality information, written for the reader primarily - not the search engines. It is easy to get blinded by focusing on nothing other than keywords, which usually results in their overuse in an unnatural and spammy looking way.
Remember - Search Engines won't buy what you are selling - but your visitors will - IF you can show them ithat you offer what it is they are looking for using tried and tested sales copy, which is reassuring and can demonstrate the product features which will benefit your visitor/potential customer.
-
we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree".
I have a website that has a lot of content about a specific topic. As that site has gained content and links from other websites in that topic area I believe that the domain as a whole has gained ranking strength in that topic niche. I don't have a formal study to support this but I simply see that new pages seem to rank easily in that niche.
In your situation, your domain might gain strength for "online degree", however, it will still remain in competition with other educational websites who are doing the same thing. So unless you are becoming the gorilla in that niche I would not expect this alone to put you on the first page of Google for "online degree". You will have to earn that ranking by producing an optimized page for that term and through the force of domain authority and inbound links to that page.
will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy?
No. Almost every site has this type of content. Think about all of the other stuff that exists on .edu domains.
Good luck with your work. I did the same thing a long time ago when online courses were very new (and search engines were very different)
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
-
Does you page need to be unique to rank
What I mean by unique is : Let's imagine I want to rank one "seo ranking factors." In order to compete do I need to have (in terms of design) that is totally different than everything out there or can I rank with a page that is presented in a very similar way than everything out there but with different content. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Wrong Pages Ranking
Good Afternoon We had an issue a while ago with the incorrect pages ranking in Google for some of our key terms. For example the page ranking for the term in Hotels in Spain was an individual information page for one particular hotel in Spain rather than the top level page which is optimised for "Hotels in Spain" The individual property page was ranking around 36-40 so we tightened up all the internal linking structure to ensure the term "Hotels in Spain" was pointing to the correct page and de-optimised the individual property page for the term. After a few weeks, everything seemed to be working and we were ranking top of second page for correct page however, ranking report today has reversed our good fortune and the incorrect page is ranking in a low position Any further suggestions or advise would be very much appreciated. Ideally, I don't want to remove the page that is ranking as it's still relevant for a search for that particular hotel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Cannot Increase Ranking For a Keyword Phrase
I've been working on the keyword phrase, "Niceville Assisted Living" for the website: http://nicevilleassistedliving.com and my increase in rankings has pretty much stalled. When I first started working on this website, a lot of the content was duplicated (which we took care of by plugging in unique content), there were locations listed on the homepage that were throwing my rankings off, I've created blog posts each week (we've even tried posting one post every day for a week), added the Facebook feed to the homepage, corrected errors in the theme, and I'm trying to get a resources page built. I know content is a very, very large part of SEO.. but it seems like the content I am plugging in isn't helping. There aren't any errors in Webmaster Tools and my keyword density is fairly close to the website ranking #1. I think my biggest problem is backlinks. Other websites have quite a few whereas the website I'm working on doesn't have any (I'm working on that, but the number I have doesn't compare to the websites ranking in the top three). I'm stumped as to what to do next. Does anyone have suggestions to improve the ranking for this keyword phrase?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReviveMedia0 -
Checking keyword rankings
I have 2 questions: 1. To check keyword rankings with firefox, i am choosing: Tools>Options>Privacy>"clear all current history" Timerange to clear: Everything Check Boxes: Browsing and download history, form and search history, cookies, cache, active logins Is there anything else I need to be doing? 2. Search results in my Niche are heavily localized. Is there any way to check rankings in another area? Ex: By default, our rankings are for Northeast NJ. Is there any way to check Baltimore, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How can we improve rankings for category pages
Hi Everyone, I have a dog breeder site I'm working on and I was wondering if I could get some tips and ideas on things to do to help the "category" pages rank better in search engines. Let's say I have "xyz" breed category page which has listings of all dog breeders who offer that particular breed, in this case "xyz". I have certain breeder profile listings which rank higher for those terms that the category page should be ranking for. So I'm guessing Google thinks those breeder profile pages are more relevant for those terms. Especially if well optimized. I know thin content may be my problem here, but one of our competitors dominates the rankings for relevant keywords with no content on their category pages. What do you all suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rsanchez0 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
Hello, Our site nlpca(dot)com dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause? Thank you so much, Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0