When trying to optimize your website for search engines, should you pick one keyword or optimize for multiple keywords? There’s no clear cut answer as SEO isn’t exactly black and white. There are different approaches you can take based on: how much time you want to spend, how much on-page SEO you plan and how much off-page SEO you’re planning as well.
Your Site Stats: Data Gold!
A good SEO approach involves trying something and seeing what fruit it bears. Read your site stats often to see how you’re doing for specific keywords and then capitalize on those words some more.
Here’s an article optimizing method that might help you:
- Write the article naturally so it reads well to people before you worry about search engines
- Check live-keyword-analysis to see if you’ve got any keywords with decent keyword density (make sure nothing is too high, such as over 2.5%)
- search with a ~ in Google (see our Google Tilde operator post) to find other related keywords and sprinkle them in.
It’s a good idea to target your SEO with a tiered strategy. Main keywords used and a layer of secondary keywords used as well. If everything is written with silos in mind in terms of using as many related words as possible while maintaining the integrity of the article you could definitely get some great results from multiple search engines.
SEO is something you’ll continue to do as part of your business and continually absorbing new knowledge about SEO best practices can definitely help you gain some ground in the SERPs.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Sean,
I am working on improving my SEO and I tend to focus on one main keyword in each of my posts. So your suggestion to include a layer of secondary keywords is something I haven’t tried. I’ll do this the next time I write a post and see how it goes.
Sean
This is a great strategy. I try to use it but sometimes find it is difficult coming up with a decent keyword.
Would MS be just as good a tool. I am noticing in your articles you are giving plenty of resources that are free. This is good for beginners but I have made the commitment to MS. Could you make comment in your articles where MS will do the same job?
Hi Gee
If you have market samurai, you will know how good it is for keyword research. Not everyone can afford to buy programs and there are free services that are worthwhile using. As far as referring to MS in articles, I will do so if I feel it’s appropriate
Hi Sean
This is extremely helpful and a good guideline for optimising an article. I can see myself doing this frequently for SEO.
It is amazing how computer savvy people have been able to create these wonderful tools to help us and although I have Market Samurai, and am still going through the tutorials, I will be giving these other tools a go too.
Thankyou Sean.
Everything I have seen so far suggests that its better to use just one keyword or a long tailed key words so that is what I have been concentrating on,
It just dawned on me that the way the search engine known that it is a keyword is by the underline, bold or italic, so you could use more than one keyword or keyphrase .
It’s best to optimise each article for a particular keyphrase (bolding, title, italicising etc) that is relevant to your niche, then sprinkling related keywords throughout the article. That way you will find that you can rank for multiple phrases over time that are all relevant to your niche topic or main keyphrase.
I find that i target one keyword for the artciles, but rely on LSI for secondary and tertiary KW’s…..I have found in webmaster that it is interesting what KW’s my articles have ranked for which I havent set up intentionally.