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I own a website and I'm in the middle of optimizing the content for both organic searches and PPC. I'm new to this. I've read mulitple references on building KW lists, slicing and dicing KW, etc. However, as I start building my KW universe I'm finding it hard to determine when too many KWs is enough. As an example, let's say I sell widgets and KW to describe these widgets can be:
Widgets
Gold Widgets
Yellow Gold Widgets
Italian Widgets
Italian Gold Widgets
Italian Yellow Gold Widgets
Ladies Widgets
Ladies Gold Widgets
Ladies Yellow Gold Widgets
Ladies Italian Widgets
Ladies Italian Gold Widgets
Ladies Italian Yellow Gold Widgets
14KT Ladies Italian Yellow Gold Widgets
... this is a small sample of the KWs I have for just widgets and I haven't even gotten to the point of deriving KW for a particular anklet yet, plurals, etc. I can easily create 500+ for just a small group of 6 items. Should I actually continue forward and create 100's or 1000's of KWs and then filter which ones make sense from a competitive perspective? When is enough enough?
Thanks and any help would be most appreciated...
[edited by: mona at 11:06 pm (utc) on Dec. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] tidying up [/edit]
When is enough enough?
...when you're thinking about the most practical way to get broadband into your grave and what sort of bracket would best fix your laptop onto the inside lid of your coffin.
That's when it's enough.
:)
Seriously though.. it becomes about balancing sanity, the ability to add quality content (not just the same page 50x with the keyphrase replaced) and the law of diminishing returns - "A law stating that as the quantity of one input increases with the quantities of all other inputs remaining the same, output increases but by ever smaller increments."
The first thing to do is turn your list upside down, so it looks like:
14KT Ladies Italian Yellow Gold Widgets
Ladies Italian Yellow Gold Widgets
Ladies Italian Gold Widgets
...
Yellow Gold Widgets
Gold Widgets
Widgets
If you focus your attentions on the more detailed phrases first, you'll get a lot more mileage. First, generally more detailed phrases are less competitive... and secondly, if you optimise your pages at all well, you will probably find quite a bit of success with the middle of the list phrases as well, simply because they are included in the extended phrase.
As to the question of how many phrases you target, I wouldn't spend a lot of energy on more than two or three of the extended phrases per 'widget'. I'd be going for a broad covering of all the widgets I stock initially.
By the time you have all of them covered, you'll have some valuable traffic stats building up to give you information on what keywords/phrases actually have value for you. It's a bit of an organised spaghetti fling - throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Being this is my first time optimizing I was getting a bit concerned about the quantity of KWs I had. Makes sense what you said... not to mention makes my sanity that much more balanced and I need it...
:-)
Would you use a similar approach to PPC?
ppc?
You do know the first letter of that acronym stands for "PAY".
And me here a girl of good Scottish descent.
no PPC experience here sorry. :)
Being of Cuban/Galician descent I should follow the same credo... Hopefully with some SEO experience I can follow my credo to the letter ;-)
One last thing... outside of experience do you suggest any particular reference or book that I could use to help fill my lack of experience in SEO?
Books, etc - don't waste your money. They date too fast, and frankly the info you get only ever skims the surface. The best resource to learn about SEO is actually right here: webmasterworld - and right on your own site: study your logs and stats.
Start with Brett's post here: [webmasterworld.com...] That's a book's worth right there. (if you haven't run across him yet, Brett Tabke founded and owns the site. Read anything with his name next to it) From memory the post is targetted at Google, but the basic steps of the strategy are so strong that it is really relevant to all search engines, and yes, I know it's a couple of year's old.. but that's how good it is - it is still entirely relevant.
If any of the terminology gets you, there's a glossary link at the top of your screen. The site search here is pretty weak, and Brett has recently banned spiders from the site, so we're not on Google at the moment, but there's a post here with simple instructions to put a site search box on your WebmasterWorld screen: [webmasterworld.com...]
When you've digested that, work your way through the forum list and look at the library link at the top of each forum - these are the 'golden' posts from that forum collected over time. Read up. As much as you can.
Then have a look at the 'recent posts' link - I have that set as my home page. Everytime I open my browser I get a snapshot of what's catching people's attention in SEO. Whether I follow up and read the posts at that time, flag them for later, or just make a mental note.. it keeps me in touch.
Oh, and Flag posts. Anything of particular interest to you, flag it before you get distracted and forget where it was. Bottom of your screen there's a flag icon. You can then go into your control panel (link at top of page) and have easy access to those posts.
Best of luck :)
Thanks
aw shucks..
thanks guys :)
