Keyword help for a beginner

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hello Everyone!

I have a few simple questions about picking/using the best keywords for my website. Just to give a little background on the company, we sell branded servers (IBM, HP, DELL) workstations, storage, and related hardware and software (memory, processors, hard drives, operating systems, management software, etc...) I'm trying to pick the keywords to use on the home page but have these questions:

1. This question is a little hard for me to explain, but we would like to show up in the search results whether a user types in: Dell server(s) or IBM server(s) or HP Workstation so for the title tag can we use: DELL, IBM, HP Servers, Workstations, Storage or we need to use DELL Servers, IBM Servers, Dell Workstations, IBM Workstations, etc... Basically what I'm asking is can we combine keywords in the title tag or we need to write them out (hope this make sense) if not let me know and I'll try provide a little more detail and few more examples.

2. This question might not fall under this category of topics and might have to start a new thread but here it goes. We are re-designing our site on a new eCommerce platform using x-cart shopping cart, its a very configurable and inexpensive shopping cart however one of the drawbacks is its speed. Most users of the x-cart shopping cart software report on average of 2-4 seconds page loads, which is kind of slow. even with some heavy optimization you get about 1.5 - 2.5 seconds page load. I've heard that if you want to be higher in Google's search results speed is a big plus, being in the 0.5 second range is a huge plus. I was thinking of creating a static html home page that would include some company info, content with relevant keywords, some links to main categories... (basically kind of copy the google.com page but with a little more text) Would that be a good idea to implement? Hope this question makes sense as well or stick with the default shopping cart home page and try to optimize it as best as possible?

3. We probably have about 10 - 15 short keyword phrases that we want to concentrate on, again they would be:
DELL Servers, HP Servers, IBM, Servers
DELL Workstations, HP Workstations, IBM Workstations,
DELL Memory, HP Memory, IBM Memory
DELL Hard Drives, HP Hard Drives, IBM Hard Drives

What is the maximum or recommended quantity of keyword phrases to try to include on the home page? Is it also recommended to maybe create a separate page for each keyword phrase? Does a home page get better ranking then another page on the server just because its a home page?

Hope my questions aren't too dumb and make sense. I appreciate everyone who takes their time to read through and answer my questions or guide me in the right path.

Thank you,
Igor Pinchevskiy

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hello Rufus,

Thanks for taking your time to help me out. However I'm still not 100$ clear on how I should proceed.

For question 1: Would it be ok to combine keywords/phrases in the title tag like this "IBM, DELL, HP. Servers, Workstations, Storage" (would the search engine use the best combination of any of the following or would it rate it differently if I were to use something like this:

"IBM Servers, DELL Servers, HP Servers, IBM Workstations, etc..." ?

For Question 2: Do you recommend to use a combination of CMS & Ecommerce for a single site, would that be of any benefit?

For Question 3: You recommend to create a seperate page for each keyword phrase and write some good content using the targeted keyword(s) and then have a link on the home page to that page, correct?

So for the homepage would you recommend using keywords that target our brand OR a few of the product keywords that we think would bring the most traffic in from search engines?

Just to confirm, the home page (index.html) wouldn't necessarily have a higher ranking vs let's say (dell-servers.html) just based on its hierarchy or being the home page. (obviously excluding the SEO work)?

Thanks again!

[rufusb]

ok, so I'm going to break this down for you

1: yes you can use multiple keyword in titles etc but you'll get better results if you create more targeted pages on your site, what I'd do is create a group of articles talking about (for example) Dell servers make them useful to your users and link them together the way your users (and google) should find lots of useful targeted content that naturally has your keywords in and if you link to this articles fro your home page they should start to rank quite well, it would also be worth finding some guest blogging opportunities to link to these articles as well as that should help boost your ranking.

2: loading speed is pretty important but managing flat html pages can be a pain why not look at using a cms like WordPress to do this, its really flexible and can be modified to look how ever you like.

3: NO stop it, don't think of your content in that don't try to cram keywords into it that is very old school and won't help you with SEEPs instead spend a bit of time write a useful article about a topic, enfant write a bunch of them, you'll naturally be putting keywords in to the articles that way and you'll probably pick up so pretty good long tail keywords at the same time.

feel free to contact me if you want more help or advice

Cheers

Rufus