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I understand that keywords should be carefully placed in the title to avoid spamming. However, let's say you have a page that has two similar but related keywords: "Swimming trunks" and "swim suits"
(A completely random choices of KW, but yes, my mind is drifting towards summer).
Is it ok to put them in the same title tag, or is this a bad strategy to combine them on the same page?
Will any search engines penalize this repetition, even if the KW are both used responsibly in the body of the page?
Thanks!
From our Glossary: [searchengineworld.com]
Stemming
Refers to root word origins. For example, Search, Searching, and Searches all have Search as the root stem. Some search engines use stemming to provide results from more than just the entered search terms. A search on Boat could return results on Boating or Boats.
Some sites may seem as though they're ranking high because of repetition of the main keywords in the title, but that might not necessarily be so. They may be ranking regardless of doing it, or without significance. It's an individual case whether it's actually a relevant factor, being repeated in the title, or whether it's being considered as part of the page altogether.
>is this a bad strategy to combine them on the same page?
As far as using several keywords or phrases in the title is concerned, it might be OK for less competitive keywords, but as a general rule it's best to target one page per keyword phrase, so in that case it's better to limit the number of keywords in the title. IMHO, it's sometimes ok for the main page to use a couple of main ones if it's multi-product, because then the page relates to an interior page that's targeted to one of the phrases.
The general rule I started with was once in the title, twice in the description and three times in the keyword tag, but I do stretch it a little with the title sometimes.
Using both of those wouldn't be spamming, not by any means in normal usage, but I wouldn't repeat them both as exact phrases in the title.
*trying to keep drool away from my keyboard* :)
I think it's a good idea to focus on each page as separate identity. Some people think "Swimming trunks" and most "swim suits". Make a focused "swim suits" page with 'swim suits' and 3 or 4 other selling fluff words in apealing page title. Repeat "swim suits" in <H1> tag and in about 5% of <drool> body text. Make your pages between 100 and 200 words. It is a good idea to fill other zones like link text, bold text and alt with "swim suits". The document can also be saved as swim_suits.htm
Repeat on separate pages for "Swimming trunks", "swim suit" and <drool> watch it go.
If you wind up going with one keyphrase per title tag, how do you create enough decent content to fill all of these pages with minor keyphrase variations?
It seems like if I want to cover several keyphrase-similar terms, I have to be a whiz at generating unique and interesting content that doesn't repeat like a broken record (either in the eyes of the reader or a search engine).
Wow. I thought what I'd learned so far about web-copy writing was rough enough. Press releases seem to have a freer structure and format :)
>how do you create enough decent content to fill all of these pages with minor keyphrase variations?
If they're product pages, there really isn't that much needed; the product descriptions can use the words with variation a couple of times to get word count up a bit.
With regular text content, if the keyphrase variations are close enough (like the swimsuits example) and not overly competitive, you can try using them both.
Where there are definite differences with different search terms for text pages it's not always easy. It can be hard to come up with enough content to fill a page, but it's not engraved in stone. Even getting up to 100 words including link text, titles and subtitles, can be a start and more can always be added, especially if you watch your logs and see "odd" search terms being used to find the pages on your site. The logs give good ideas for content and keyword development; it's coming up with enough to say that's the challenge.
