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Knowing that people are using qualifiers more and more has really helped me. In certain areas on my movie site (say, perhaps a celebrity name where there are 800 fan pages, 300 sites actively promoting that person's movies for sale, directory after directory listing the sites, and the sites that promise that for $2.95 you can look at that person naked for 3 days) there is just no viable way for me to rank consistently at #1. True, I could spend a month getting links to that page and getting it up there, but then all the other pages on my site would be neglected.
Every site has a broad theme and then several or many pages inside the site that deal with a more specific thing. Whether you have a broad range of products with specific products listed, or broad theme with specific informational articles - you can't possibly key in on everything.
This is where the magical qualifier, or "Third Word", comes into play. Your site is on widgets, but since blue ones are vastly more popular than red ones, you're much deeper in the SERPS for the term "blue widgets". Again, focusing your efforts on your blue widgets page might help increase the rankings, but now you've gone and neglected not only your red, yellow, white, and plaid widget listings, but also your front page.
Interestingly, you can increase your rankings significantly by going for the third word set of surfers. There are obvious ones: "blue widget-" "-information", "-history", "-specs" etc. There are less obvious ones, as well, and that's what I'd like to explore a bit more of.
On my site, I've recently been getting hits for a very odd third-word that you wouldn't expect people to be looking for. It's perfectly legitimate and relevant and the "Keyword Suggestion Tool" says that's it's searched for only about 1400 times a month. BUT - and here's the key - if you remove that word I'm like 92nd of 800K+ pages. Add that "third word" in and I'm #1 of 12. Therefore, out of those 1400 searches in a month, I'm liable to see 95%(?) of those searchers on my site.
Therefore, I just thought it was worth mentioning this and maybe start a discussion about other people's thoughts and experiences with this. Afterall, what's better? 2% of a million dollar market or 95% of an $80,000 market?
G.
I noted that:
Word 1 - general - widgets
Word 2 - specific - "a colour", "a service", etc
Word 3 - regional - "a country", "a city", etc
Also there are different results depending on which order you type them in.
My motivations for this were that all my competitors are large companies that dominate single word rankings (but dont really hold any benefit to users on a local or regional basis), so i though id educate my users as to how to get more relevant results by using more specific searches.
(99% are looking for "blue widgets in UK" by searching for "widgets")
That was only a few days ago so i cant comment on how effective its been though.
JOAT
It seems that a significant number of users is not only searching for "widget" but for "foobar 2342 widget" or "acme xyz123 widget".
As a consequence, instead of talking in general terms about us "providing all sorts of widgets" (among with countless other comptetitors) we actually implemented a number of rather specific pages dealing with each and every widget-manufacturer - and where it makes sense even with single widget types - individually.
"foobar 2342 widget" or "acme xyz123 widget".
Yes, I get quite a few hits for very specific product names also. For me though, most of them want to know where they can get a new manual from :(
I've found alot of play in including all kinds of words like 'cool' 'neat' and 'cheap' etc... I rank on the first page for my main 2/3 word phrase but add one of the above and I'm #1
Funny old world 'aint it?
Nick
i.e. instead of going for root page SEO, create a whole bunch of content-rich pages to address those 3 word niches, and more or less forget about link pop.
Is this a way to get out from under the shadow of giants that dominate the 1-2 word universe. Should I start with 3-words, and forget about 1-2 words for now.
Thanks,
ezGuy
Ah-ha, a sales opportunity. I had a client in a similar position. We now sell the manuals from the site in .pdf format. Nice little income generator, covers the cost of hosting and monthly maintenance.
On having re-read however, yep, agree absolutely... third words, usually an added adjective in my case, are absolutely key.
We now sell the manuals from the site in .pdf format
hehe, nice one p1results! If I can figure how to take credit cards without breaking the bank I may well optimize a bunch of pages for manuals ;)
Nick
<edit>Ooops spelling!</edit>
[edited by: Nick_W at 8:24 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2002]
<edit>Thanks Nick!</edit>
Years ago that term might have applied. ;)
I'm not suggesting anything - I guess too much depends on the market you're in. Our "widgets" are in the $10.000 - $40.000 range, so adding a "cool" or "nice" doesn't quite fit there.
Even though we're running a website since 1996 we're fairly new in the SEO business ourselves. Having an honest, no-nonsense and straightforward website we managed to get a pretty good ranking on Google with applying ANY special techniques.
So finding out about the "acme 2342 widget" instead of plain "widget" was the first step towards optimization. But I rather like to think about it as "customer search pattern optimization" since we only added information in areas where the prospective customer actually looks for!
In consequence, now we get some pretty cool rankings for "acme 2342 widget" on Google - in one case even a better ranking than the widget's manufacturer herself!
But - in essence - what works for us is not necessarily working for you. All I can say is keep an eye on your logfiles and find out what your visitors are looking for. Try to deduce a typical pattern from it, and enhance your site along these lines. If "neat" and "cool" works for you - great! Try "nifty" or "bizarre" or "trendy" next. If that doesn't work, try "cheap" or "inexpensive". But always keep an eye on the logs!
And as for submitting seperate specialized pages instead of the top page: no, all we ever submitted so far was the top page.
This might change - I have to read a bit around and watch the threads. We only got good rankings on Google - on all the other SE we're in the lower third. Maybe submitting different pages and/or setting up other widget-oriented-domains might be a better approach.
But that#s a new thread I guess...
