Keyword Targeting Best Practices??

[bronxpad]

What is the best way to target a specific keyword? I rank well for several of my keywords but want to do better on others. How do I go about doing this?

[glennfriesen]

**How to develop your ****_1-true-keyword _**into a topical theme:

• Determine your primary keyword(s) - 1-10 terms that you think describe your site well.

• List acronyms & jargon related to your primary keyword(s).

• List synonyms, plurals, and related phrases.

• Start adding modifiers to the set of words you've grown.

• Repeat the process with each "categorical topical theme" your site is about.

• Now you've developed a long list of targets, and it's time to prioritize.

• Do your research. Get data on the search volume for each keyword in your list. Determine searcher intent.

• Figure out if you have existing resources available to serve up for each keyword in your list.

• Go Pro at SEOmoz, and record each keyword's keyword difficulty score.

• Average out the ranking domain and page authority of the top 3-5 sites for each term you're targeting to better understand your playing field.

With this data, you can now make educated decisions about which keywords from your set to target first. You can evaluate which keywords might be the least difficult to rank for, and which might be the most rewarding to rank for, and make decisions that will truly optimize your search engine marketing efforts.

_ http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-target-one-keyword-at-a-time-for-SEO-or-two+_

If you're localizing your keyword list, you can use a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice, or use online tools to append local terms (like area codes and city names) to your primary keywords list:

• Local Marketing Source developed this useful local keyword research tool which appends local search terms to your list of primary keywords.
• 5Minutes has a very useful tool for generating and appending local search terms to your targeted general keyword list as well.

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[AlanBleiweiss]

"Lightly" seeding alternate phrases into a page's main content area where those are TIGHTLY related to the existing page's topical focus can often help if you do so by writing natural paragraph based content that includes those.

Also, vary up the anchor text that links into those pages, both from content areas of other pages on your site (not in navigation, and please, NEVER in footers), as well as from off-site inbound link sources.

Always keep the topical focus and link source to link destination highly relevant and trustworthy.

And don't try to go for one-to-one parity on forcing new links to have to match every single phrase or partial variation of a phrase you've seeded the page with.  Let it unfold more "randomly".

By taking those steps alone, I have helped sites increase total volume of keyword phrases used to discover client sites by leaps and bounds because Google is really good (some of the time) at recognizing the broader context of a page when you use those methods.