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Ask the Experts: How Should I Combine My Top…

  • March 9, 2007
  • by Jennifer Grappone

Q: When generating your top 10 keyword list you say that one step is to combine your keywords. This confused me and I was hoping you could provide additional perspective.

On my top 10 list I have 3 phrases:

hamburger stands
great hamburger stands
best hamburger stands

Do you mean I should shrink this to 2 phrases (“great hamburger stands ” and “best hamburger stands”). If that’s the case, wouldn’t I be dropping out anyone who searches for “hamburger stands” which is a much broader (and very relevant) term for me? Won’t I miss a lot of people by doing this?

A: We do recommend combining keyword phrases when they contain the same keyword(s) in them. Let’s say your visible text contains 7 instances of the phrase “great hamburger stands.”  The search engines will know that your page is relevant to both “hamburger stands” and “great hamburger stands”, and you won’t “miss” your target audience. Technically, the keyword density (number of instances of the keyword phrase compared to the total number of words on the page) will be better for “great hamburger stands” vs. “hamburger stands,” but unless you’re in an extremely competitive situation, it’s still fine to combine the two on a given page.

Another very good reason to combine keywords is that it usually makes for much better writing. It’s important to avoid keyword-stuffed, repetitive sentences like this: “If you’re looking for hamburger stands, we’ll show you the best hamburger stands because we’re all about hamburger stands, especially the BEST hamburger stands.” And you want to avoid HTML title tags like: “ZappyCo: Hamburger Stands and Best Hamburger Stands,” because it’s not compelling to write that way!

And, most importantly, just because you’re combining the phrases doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use just “hamburger stands” on your site – you should feel free to use it as needed! And you can also track your site’s performance for both variations of the terms.

We’re talking about organic (non-paid) optimization here. If you’re opening a pay-per-click account, as a rule it’s actually better to list all variations of your keyword phrases if you have the budget to do so.

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3 COMMENTS
  • David Nunez - asesoras de hogar puertas adentro
    March 19, 2011 at 1:32 pm

    Hi !
    I have had the same situation with my website, whose we publish job classified ad.
    The main problem is that audience search jobs and publish job ad using the a combination of this words…
    Busco nana, busco nanas, busco asesora de hogar, busco asesoras de hogar, and all of this phrases are the same, nanny and house keeper.
    I have measure using adwords, but prints and clics are very close…

    To solve it, i have use 2 versions of the page, in the first one i’m using plural words, and in the second one i’m using singular words.
    The page is renamed for a daemon every 1 hour using every set of words, for indexation.

    Do you think this is an SEO ethical solution for this problem?

    Best regards.

    David

  • Anti Wrinkle Cream
    May 7, 2013 at 6:13 pm

    Hi! Do you know if they make any plugins to help with SEO?
    I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not seeing
    very good gains. If you know of any please share. Cheers!

  • Manuela
    July 16, 2013 at 8:17 am

    Hey there! Do you know if they make any plugins to
    help with Search Engine Optimization? I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m not seeing very good gains.
    If you know of any please share. Kudos!

Comments are closed.

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