Keyword distribution in the whole site
-
I've been taught during a SEO course that the whole site has to contain the chosen keywords with a fixed proportion of optimized pages, that should be like this:
50% of pages optimized on the most relevant keyword (just one keyword)
25% of pages optimized on secondary kewords (depending on the size of the site, could be a few pages for each secondary keywords)
25% of pages on long tail keywords.
the teachers was a very respected SEO professional, but I've never seen this strategy anywhere in other articles or SEO guides.
what do you think about it?
It's true that it brings visibility for the top keyword?
does it lead to cannibalization?
what others strategy do you use? -
My definition of relevant in this case is: the keyword is often used in sentences with the term.
If my keyword was cold cereal, the words milk, bowl, and spoon would be relevant. I could then build pages for the long tail search terms:
Cold cereal bowl
how much milk should I put in a cold cereal
What is the best spoon to use with cold cereal
On each of those pages, I would link to my main page which is optimized for the keyword cold cereal using the anchor text "cold cereal", but only if it made sense to me as a user to see that phrase linked. Sometimes you have to be creative in your content copy, but most of the time it can be done and make sense to the end user.
Google is very good at recognizing these relevant keyword patterns.
-
It does make sense. But what is your exact definition of "relevant"? How is the keyword used in the content?
-
It is important you keep in mind the terms relevancy verses optimized. A page can be relevant to a topic (main keyword) without being optimized for that keyword. When this is the case, you can focus on a long-tail keyword for a sub-page and have relevancy for the main keyword. You would then want to link to the main page with the main keyword from the sub-page.
In this case I would say that what you learned in your class is true, keep AT LEAST 50% of the pages RELEVANT to the main keyword, but not optimized to the main keyword.
The end grading factor though is, what works for your site? A lot of SEO is trial and error based upon bsaic principles. Sometimes you just have to try what your gut tells you to do and watch and see if that works, if not try the next idea.
-
it was a one day beginners course, and we was talking about a 100 pages site targeted to national audience (italy) as an example.
but was presented as a general startegy.
Now I'm not a total newbie anymore, I have worked on some sites with goods results using this technique.
Nowadays I'm working on a 100 pages site, targeting to USA whole market. I've find relevant keywords for the market and I'm making decision about pairing pages and keywords.
My question is: is the strategy illustrated good for a site like that? how many pages I have to optimize for each relevant keyword? I have about 30 keywords, and 8 among them are the most importants
-
Hi David,
Build your site for your audience, create good content they will want to read, learn from or simply be entertained by. For on page SEO use the seomoz on page optimization tool and target one keyword per page. You can also use scheema.org to add some meta descriptions, this will helo the search engine determine what you page is about.
For external link building:
50% Anchor branded name / URL
25% Diverse anchor text
25% Exact Match
Hope this helps.
-
The first thing I would take in to consideration is, how much did you pay for the class? Was it a quick one day thing, a couple hours long or a week? How in depth was the instructor able to go? For a complete newbie just getting in to SEO with a small website (4-5 pages) these would be some good tips because it would give them experience optimizing pages and watching a keyword start to climb. With a site that small, it's most likely something that is trying to climb in a local search. In a small populated area doing local SEO, this would work very well to rank in most areas.
There is a possibility this could lead to cannibalization, but it all depends on how you structure the 50% of pages that are "optimized" for the keyword. Ask yourself, "Is there one page that is clearly about my keyword that others reference?"
Other strategy to ask yourself is, "Does it make sense to the user or just the search engine?" Search engines themselves don't buy anything.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta keywords
should every site have meta keywords or is this not used anymore? I don't use yoast and prefer rank math but there is nowhere to insert it. when I look at moz bar it shows meta keywords as a field so maybe it is important...
On-Page Optimization | | Mosaj0 -
Keyword Stuffing
Working on optimizing my e-commerce website. We have managed to obtain very good ranking on most keywords that we use directing to different products. However, there is one that ranks very low, and Moz alerts that keyword stuffing might be one of the reasons. While I have edited the content to include less of the same keyword on that particular page, the links to different products that contain the same keyword from the same page (accessories and related products) I believe are increasing my count and it seems to be working against me. \ Should I start eliminating some of these links so as to eventually obtain a better ranking? any help would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | NewVape0 -
"Turning off" content to a site
One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar? This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind: “Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.” What are your thoughts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour0 -
Problem with Occurrences of Keyword
At "On-Page Report " i have noticed that the only important problem my site has is the "Occurrences of Keyword " it says that i have ONLY 14.156 keyword repeat. My page ofcourse does not have so many repeats of same keyword. In fact this keyword is shown 10 times as i saw at source code of this page i tested. This report is for one page or for all pages of domain ? My keyword was two words keyword if that matters but there is no way that keywords to be repeated so many times.
On-Page Optimization | | Web-Builders0 -
If I want to rank well on one keyword would it be better to optimize multiple pages on the website for the keyword or should I only optimize one page for that keyword?
If I want to rank well on one keyword would it be better to optimize multiple pages on the website for the keyword or should I only optimize one page for that keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Rename index.php or keyword in URL?
It is important for me to get good search results for keyword + city name For instance: tulips amsterdam What would be better: renaming index.php or adding the cityname to the URL? www.example.com/amsterdam/tulips OR www.example.com/pages/tulips-amsterdam
On-Page Optimization | | svdg0 -
Content for ecommerce site
How important on site/page contents are for ecommerce site. Keeping in mind the page layout. Its not that important to have page copy/content at all for ecommerce sites If yes, does position of content is an important factor? if putting page copy/content in upper fold of a page then the most important thing which is product itself will have less exposure if putting near the footer of the page, does that seem like doing just for the sake of SEs and ranking. How important internal linking form that content would be compare to left panel links or links at the header of a website Thanks Rick
On-Page Optimization | | RickGa0 -
Webmaster tools Site speed?
Google webmaster tools site performance is reading out at 2.8 and still raising (Going further into the slow pale area) this was in the green fast area for a while until now. Is this something to be worried about?
On-Page Optimization | | BobAnderson0