How To Optimize A Page For Search Engines And Successfully Target Over 10,000 Keywords
by Mark Nunney, 3 September 2008
A quick guide to optimizing a page for search engines to successfully target over 10,000 keywords.
Key points
- Focus each page’s SEO on a primary and a secondary keyword.
- Search for target words in Wordtracker and use them in page title tag, description tag, headers, body text, internal and external linking text.
- If you can, use over 1,000 words for the body text.
- Make your page useful, interesting or amusing enough for others to link to.
Optimizing your pages (on-page SEO) is a small part of the ‘creating content’ stage of the SEO process that includes keyword research, strategy, planning and creating content, site structure andsite navigation, and then promoting that content to build links.
Let’s look at how it’s done…
Focus your page’s SEO on a primary and a secondary keyword
To get started, target each page’s SEO on a primary and secondary keyword. (Don’t make the common mistake of using different pages to target the same keywords.)
Your page will be targeting many more than those two keywords – they are your starting point and your focus. Follow the steps below, write more than a thousand useful interesting words, and your page can successfully target tens of thousands of keywords. Before we go on, I’d just like to show that this really does work…
The following image is from a Google Analytics report for a page from thinkingmanagers.com about swot analysis andstrengths and weaknesses. We can see that visitors have used over 10,000 different keywords to reach it.
An interesting and illuminating part of this page’s success and its on-page SEO is that, at the moment, it doesn’t rank particularly well for its primary and secondary keywords. It does so well because it digs deep into those keywords’ long tails – other keywords that contain the target words.
To choose your primary and secondary keywords, follow the SEO process from keyword research to SEO strategy and a build a plan for content.
On the following example page (see grab), the primary and secondary keywords are:
‘Business strategy’ & ‘Business continuity strategy’
You can see those keywords in the page title shown at the top of the browser window.
Enter target keywords into Wordtracker
Enter your primary target keywords into Wordtracker’s Keyword Researcher – see below:
Use Wordtracker’s suggestions if possible and as appropriate. Our example page has used a number of keywords from Wordtracker’s results.
Use singulars, plurals, synonyms and ‘similars’. See that our example page uses strategic, strategies, planning, plans and strategy models.
Use target keywords in these specific places
Use your primary and secondary target keywords in the following positions:
- Page title tag
See the following grab from our example page:
… the code of which looks like this:
<title>Business strategy | Business continuity Strategy</title>
- Description tag
Most experts say that your description metatag won’t improve your SERPs rankings as it’s not directly considered by search engines but they’ll also use it because a good description metatag can increase clickthroughs if your site is seen on a search engine results page (SERP).
Also there is some evidence that increased clickthroughs might in turn increase rankings.
Here’s a simple formula for your description tags:
primary & secondary keywords + benefits of your site, and (if you’re really clever) a call to action
From our example site:
“Business strategy & Business continuity strategy: Improve your business with advice and free newsletter from leading gurus Edward de Bono and Robert Heller”
Here’s the code for that:
<meta name=”description” content=”Business strategy & Business continuity strategy: Improve your business with free insight and advice from leading gurus Edward de Bono and Robert Heller” />
- Headlines, sub-headlines and body text
Following is a grab from our example site showing a headline and a sub-headline which includes our target keywords:
Next, below is a screenshot of the start of the example page’s body text, with target keywords highlighted:
Note we haven’t used the target keywords as much as we might have. But don’t be afraid to use them more if you think it won’t reduce the level of response from your readers. Make sure your sentences are real sentences and that you use variations such as singulars, plurals, synonyms and ‘similars’ (words with similar meanings).
- Internal and external links (use text)
The blue text in above body copy is links to other pages on the site. Notice how they use the target keywords (and variations of them). It’s also good practice to link to other sites, preferably sites that rank well for your target keywords.
Over 1,000 words if you can
Long, detailed, useful, inspiring or amusing articles that follow the above guidelines will target a long tail of keywords that your target market are searching with. This will include thousands of keywords that you can’t research – some of which haven’t even been thought of because 20% of all searches are with keywords that have never been used before.
Also – long, detailed, useful, inspiring or amusing articles will be linked to if they are found. And getting them found is alink building job.
This article is offered as a resource to help individuals, organizations, and companies inexperienced with search engine optimization learn the basics of how the service and process operate. It is our goal to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO.
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micheel
buzz marketting