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Honing Down Keywords and Keyphrases

Chopping down long META keyword lists

         

weisinator

10:05 pm on Mar 16, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I've been reading through webmaster world and search engine world for the past couple of days, gobbling up as much info as I could. This is one of the best resources I have found on the web. Keep up the good work!

Having read the "26 steps" column, I am challenging myself to getting at least 20 hits a day (starting small) in a very small niche, a Car Audio site dedicated to GM's W-Body platform (Lumina, Grand Prix, Cutlass, Regal, etc.). Depending on what the SE keyword logs tell me, I might expand it to encompass all car audio later.

Having used Overture.com's "Keyword picker" for "Chevrolet Lumina", it spat out "1991 Lumina Z34" as the top keyword search for February. Others that jumped out at me were "1992 Lumina" "1993 Lumina Euro", etc.

Should my META Keywords be a list of words, or should I use phrases like the above?

Should I do this (example): "1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, Chevrolet, Lumina, Euro, Z34, 3.4"

OR should I do this (example): "1992 Lumina Euro 3.4, 1992 Lumina Z34, 1992 Lumina 3.1 Coupe, 1992 Lumina 3.1 Sedan,..."

Any help would be appreciated.

brotherhood of LAN

10:17 pm on Mar 16, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



welcome to webmaster world!

I think you should check out competing sites and compare it to what you have in mind

then, when you make the site, you know who the big players are and what keywords to avoid to begin with.

Get some "niche" keywords that are not very competitive but have good traffic (trial and error). When your site gets larger, you can incorporate the "bigger keywords" into your site, and hopefully over the long term get a good ranking on them

I definetely recommend reading up in these forums and using the site search at the top. There is enough information here about SE's design and anything related to keep you busy :)

Woz

10:25 pm on Mar 16, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi weisinator, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

There are two basic schools of thought regarding how to punctuate your keywords tag, commas or spaces, but one general rule should be followed at all times:-

"Make sure you only use keywords in the tag that appear in the page text."

That is the most important thing to do.

As to punctuation, the thing to decide is whether you are going to use keywords, or keyphrases. As soon as you have even one comma, then you are in the world of key phrases so make sure you use the comma to puntuate all your phrases. If you are going to use words then you can either use commas or just spaces.

The challenge comes with the number or words or phrases you want to target and gaining maximum combinations without spamming. One rule of thumb is to never use a word more than three times. So if you have different premutaions of words then you could target those permuations using a well though out word syntax.

Lets say you want to target fly fishing, and fishing rods. You could have

"fly fishing,fishing rods" or simply

"fly fishing rods" which actually gets you three possible combinations.

You could take it further, such as

"freshwater fly fishing rods and tackle shop"

which would get you a number of combinations. Doing the same with commas would end up with

"freshwater fly fishing,fly fishing rods,fishing rods, fishing rods and tackle,rods and tackle,fishing rods and tackle shop,rods and tackle shop,tackle shop"

As you can see in this example though, fishing, rods, and tackle are all repreated more than three times which would be a problem.

Get the idea? This is a very basic explanation, I suggest you read as much as you can here, and search for "keyword tag" and "keyword spam" for more detailed help.

and remember, "Make sure you only use keywords in the tag that appear in the page text."

Onya
Woz

weisinator

4:47 pm on Mar 17, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the help, both of you. I'm off to search!