6 replies to this topic

[Aji]

Hi all,

I have a question, which arised during my first assignment.

1) When you start a site, how many keywords do you taget? If I target 20 keyphrases then I have to use 20 of them as anchor text and this will dilute my target phrase. In short when a person start his/her website, how many keyphrases should he/she target?

2) Per page how many key phrase to be optimized for?

3) If I am optimizing my xyz.com/page1.html , then should I get the links(external) to xyz.com/page1.html or to xyz.com.

Thanks
Aji

[qwerty]

It's not really a question of how many to target for the site. You do your research and figure out which phrases are relevant and valuable, you look at the pages you've already got (assuming it's a pre-existing site), and you decide which phrases will do the best job of targeting traffic for each of those pages. I generally try to do two or three kw phrases per page.

Then you look at the phrases that are left on your list and start to think about creating new pages that can target them. After all, these are phrases that you've determined to be both relevant and a potentially decent source of targeted traffic, so they should serve as a guide in the creation of new content. You should think of them as requests -- some number of people are searching on this phrase, and this phrase is an aspect of what your site is about, so give the people what they want.

[rohgan03]

I would say get links to xyz.com till you get a PR5 atleast. The PR will get distributed throughout your site. You can then target xyz.com/page1.html if page1 is not ranking well and you need PR improvements. Concentrate your efforts to get high PR on one main page first.

[anthonyparsons.com]

What has PR got to do with anything rohgan03?

Pr has nothing to do with ranking your webpage for relevant keyword phrases.

PageRank is only a measure from Google on how "Google" relates a website. What about the other major engines? People and their far out theories about PageRank......

Aji, as qwerty said, keep it to two or three per page and you should have no problems. Either way, you will only ever get one to be primary with the rest as secondary and so on.

If your prime keyword is "disposable computer" for example, then maybe your secondary would be, "disposable computer new york" for instance. That is idealistic, but not everything is that simple. You will always get bonus phrases out of a page regardless what you optimize for, some still remaining targeted and some not.

[alansmith]

With yahoo now worlshiping all the is google is their much point spending time optermising for anything other than google?

[anthonyparsons.com]

Welcome Alan,

With Yahoo about to kick Google and take up Inktomi results, it is making many quite scared. The way it has been with ranking well in Google automatically rubbed off with Yahoo as default, people just forgot about it. Yahoo is a major provider in visitors to websites. Losing yahoo results would have significant impact on many websites, so; you will now see many attempting to please Inktomi (feeding Yahoo and all) as well as Google. I never understood this method as I have always optimized for the majority of engines and never a specific engine.

I refuse clients who want me to optimize for one or two engines. The exact reason is, when Google does what it is currently doing and everyone panics, websites get lost and so on, clients immediately turn to their SEO and begin asking questions and doubting ability. Now this type of thing is most definitely out of an SEO's capable hands. General optimization that performs across all major engines tends not to be affected as much with traffic losses when one engine decides to have a major update and change the way they do business.

I would most definitely not optimize just for Google though, with Yahoo changing and MSN bringing out their own search technology in the near future (currently in beta test). This will make (3) major engines to optimize for as they will all be battling for the #1 spot "Search Engine Of The Year".

Edited by anthonyparsons.com, 02 February 2004 - 09:03 PM.

[mcanerin]

As a general rule, I try to optimise for about 3 keyphrases per page. Sometimes you can get more due to overlap, but I find your content starts sounding and looking pretty stupid once you get too far past 3 per page.

I also try NOT to optimise for just one keyphrase per page, and so far have not been the victim of any spam filters, which happens regularly to "one horse wonders".

Overlap is when you can optimise for 2 or more keywords or phrases at once: ie custom red widgets, is also custom widgets and red widgets.

During the process, I'll often sprinkle a few of my other keywords in the text, as well, but won't worry about the keyword density or any specific optimisation. This helps catch a lot of highly specific niche phrases, and bolsters the "theme" for the SE's that care about it (not Google, that I'm aware of - though it may have changed after Florida the way localrank appears to be used.)

Hope that helps,

Ian