Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
i do have a site that ranks well on the word green widget, my links have the anchor text green widget in it and my site is talking mainly about green widgets.
However I don't understand why I don't rank on the word green by itself ? and why I rank getter on a the synonym of green widget ( let's use "yellow" widget ) see that I don't talk about yellow anywhere on my site and have no links with the word yellow in it ?
Someone told me about over optimisation of the word green widget ? any other reasons ? and what can I do to rank on the word green ?
Thank you,
If the topic isn't "green" but really "green widgets" then you won't rank well on a search for "green". Added to that, there's the simple fact that single term ranking is a much bigger challenge than phrase ranking.
...over optimisation of the word green widget
member22 - It's not clear from your question whether "green widget" is a keyphrase (ie, two words... a keyword plus an adjective), or one "word", as you have suggested.
Also, confusing... normally, if "green" is the adjective and "widget" is the main keyword, you'd want to optimize for "green widget" and eventually hope also to rank for "widget" by itself. That's extremely difficult to do. Single words are extremely competitive, and ranking on single words requires a lot of high quality inbound links containing the word.
But the thought of ranking for the adjective "green" by itself is something that's never occurred to me. I would think ranking on an adjective...
(a) wouldn't be possible for any normal site, and...
(b) most likely, it wouldn't be useful.
Even ranking on the single keyword "widget" sometimes isn't as useful as you might suppose. While there's a lot of traffic, it's often so general that it's not very productive.
There are some very notable exceptions out there, but generally it's the case that people who search for a single word don't know what they're looking for.
NOUNS have a higher priority than
ADJECTIVES which describe nouns or
ADVERBS which action nouns
Take a refresher course in English grammar.
"Green" is an adjective or an adverb (very limited!)... and is never a noun. And the noun is where the real weight is found on ANY search engine... and these days Bing is doing a better job, in my opinion.
However I don't understand why I don't rank on the word green by itself ?
It could be a penalty or it could just be that the single word has a lot more competition. Do you even rank in the top 200 or so for "green"? Sometimes it is less work and easier to sustain traffic levels to rank for hundreds or thousands of multi-word search phrases related to green widgets than it is to rank for just green or just widgets. anyway.
It could be a penalty or it could just be that the single word has a lot more competition.
It can take years of concentrated effort to rank well on a single word.
Also, there's really no point worrying about ranking on an adjective by itself. Wikipedia or a well-known brand with the adjective in its name might rank on an adjective. But ranking on an adjective is not a very useful goal.
...it is less work and easier to sustain traffic levels to rank for hundreds or thousands of multi-word search phrases related to green widgets than it is to rank for just green or just widgets.
A much better way to think about it.
