Ask the Experts: How Do I Optimize for the…

Q: I’m a newbie reading your “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day” book, and I had a question. On one hand I’d like my target keywords to be general and broad. However, these are highly competitive terms, and the big boys already have a leg up on them, so I was considering going after more specific keywords, [names of individual products] that I carry. Problem is that I have over 6,000 [individual products].

Should I be going for more general terms? Should I go after specific product names? Do I choose my 10 most popular products to optimize for? What if those products change in popularity over the months, and I just spent months trying to optimize for them?

A: Your situation is well-suited to a “long tail” approach to keyword optimization. This means that rather than selecting a short list of 10 or so keywords, you will dedicate your site to ranking well for a wide range of keywords, with all pages following site-wide general optimization guidelines. Each of the many thousands of product names may not get much of search volume, but in aggregate, this “long tail” provides a large amount of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a shoe store and you decide that optimizing for specific shoe model names is the way to go. Do some keyword research on a sample set of product names (perhaps 5) to determine how people are searching. Are they searching for just the name, or something like “buy XXX online,” or any other variations? Do they include a brand name too? (as an aside, these patterns might change seasonally, so be sure to look at year-round numbers rather than just current numbers). Once you know what word patterns you’re targeting, you work on optimization for a TYPICAL product landing page. For this page, you make up general rules such as:

• HTML Page Title always follows the formula “Joe’s Discount Shoes: Buy [shoe name] Online” (or whatever your chosen formula is)
• Product Name always follows the formula: “[brand: shoe model]” (or whatever your chosen formula is).
• Description always includes “buy [brand: shoe model] online…”
• URL is always /brand-shoe-name.html
• Product photo always includes an ALT Tag: “Shoes: [Brand]: [Shoe Model]”
• Navigation text always includes shoe model name

(Note these are all examples and you should develop your own list).

In addition to the above, you may wish to choose a small number of generic, highly popular terms and to target these on your home page, or even include them sitewide, by incorporating them into your formulas. This combination of “queen bee” keywords (popular terms that get royal treatment on your site) with “long tail” keywords (lower volume keywords with a large number of different landing page possibilities) is often a powerful SEO strategy.

The basic principals in the book don’t change, but you’ll be applying them to ALL your pages rather than just a set number of landing pages.

Ask the Experts: Should I Optimize for Exact Phrase…

Q: I really like your book but I am unable to find specific guidance on something that I think is really important – optimizing for exact phrase searches – “search phrase here” versus search phrase here. What’s your recommendation and why? It seems more or less impossible to have a realistic shot at high rankings without exact phrase optimization. On the other hand, how many people really search with exact phrases (I don’t but maybe I should!)?

A: While our gut is telling us that only a small percentage of searches are performed with quotes, we don’t know of any published research on this. Your question made us curious, so we took a look at our own sites (using Google Analytics), and found that between 1 and 3% of entry keywords contained quotes.

It is certainly possible that your audience has a greater-than-average tendency to use quotes. We would think that certain types of content, like musical lyrics, might have a higher than normal proportion of searches in quotes.

However, we suspect that even if folks are searching using quotes, there’s no single particular phrase that you will be able to focus on. Since searchers are moving further and further toward the long tail of search, there are going to be more & more variations in what they’re searching for. As far back as 2004 Google reported that 50% of its search queries each day were unique (used only once that day). What this tells us is that we must not get too fixated on a single incarnation of a phrase. Instead, we should be thinking about clusters of variations on a phrase, and even synonyms, all used naturally on a page. (Which is nice because it allows for more natural language than trying to say the exact same thing several times on a page!). One of the best descriptions of this is by Matt Cutts, the famed Google engineer, as he describes creating an article and incorporating keywords.

Our advice: stick to using quotes in your data gathering (if at all), and focus your optimization efforts on several variations of your top keyword choices.