Help Selecting Home, Category, Product Page Keywords

[AlabuSkinCare]

Hi folks,

I read the beginners guide (a couple times, haha) but I have some questions on specific keyword selection for pages on our site. We make natural skin care products. Goat milk soap is our flag ship product and we make about 15 different varieties. For the moisturizers, we have normally at most two different kids (two body lotions, two body butters, one facial moisturizer, etc).

My questions are:

What keywords should I select to optimize the home page for? Should these be broad keywords like "natural skin care"? We've never tried to rank for things like this before because they are highly competitive. Or should they be specific keywords? Specific keywords would compete with our own product pages I think, which is not good, right?

What page should I select to optimize for the term "goat milk soap"? Since we make many varieties, I'm inclined to optimize the "category" page for the term "goat milk soap", and optimize the individual product pages for variations on it (e.g. "lavender goat milk soap"). Does that make sense?

This site is a brand new site for us and we've done practically zero SEO work on it so far. I'm just kinda getting into SEO. So I'm just trying to figure out a good strategy before I begin. If you want to check out the site its http://alabu.com. Any suggestions on a general SEO strategy are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Hal

[AlabuSkinCare]

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks so much for the help, and thanks for the title examples I think you've set me on the right track now!

Kindly,

Hal

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Hal,

Great questions - thanks for writing in.

In addition to optimizing your pages for specific keywords, there's one more thing you want to consider - What's the best title you can write to get both clicks and conversions?

If you have a brand new site, it's unlikely you're going to rank very high for a competitive term, but you want to get the most out of every impression that the search engines give you. This is even more important on the homepage as it will likely get the most impressions.

If goat milk soap is your flagship product, it might be wise to work it into your homepage, although it doesn't nessarily have to be front and center.

Let's take your existing title....

**Truly Natural Moisturizers & Skin Care Products | Alabu Skin Care**

1. The first thing I notice is "Skin Care" twice, which is probably unnecessary.

2. I like the "Truly Natural" - it's something I might click, although I think there's room for improvement

3. Let's see if we can add Goat's Milk Soap

So some possibilities:

"Obsessively Natural Skin Care Products & Goat Milk Soap | Alabu"

The problem with this one is it moves the target keywords too far to the end, where they have less effective power.

"Alabu Goat Milk Soap & Skin Care Products - Truly Natural"

Now it feels like we're getting somewhere. I'm sure you can improve it way beyond this, but you get where I'm going.

As for your second question, which page to optimize for Goat Milk Soap, I think you're right on the money wanting to optimize your category page for the broad term, and get more specific with the category pages. Keep in mind Google may or may not follow your wishes. You may get a stubborn product page that ranks for what you intended your category page for, or vice versa. You'll have to experiment. Inbound links and anchor text play a large roll in the final determination.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!