What is the best approach to a keyword that has multiple abbreviations?
-
I have a site for which the primary keyword has multiple abbreviations.
The site is for the computer game "Football Manager", each iteration is often referred to as FM2012, FM12 or Football Manager 2012, the first two can also be used with or without spaces inbetween.
While this is only 3 keywords to target, it means that every key phrase such as "FM2012 Tactics", must also be targeted in 3 ways.
Is there a recommended approach to make sure that all 3 are targeted?
At present I use the full title "Football Manager" in the the title and try to use the shorter abbreviations in the page, I also make sure the title tags always have an alternative e.g
Two specific questions as well as general tips:
-
Does the <abbr>HTML tag help very much?</abbr>
-
Are results likely to differ much for searches for "FM 2012" and "FM2012" i.e. without the space.
-
-
Personally I would make the root domain a catch-all for every term. You don't need separate pages for each phrase you want to rank for. If the entire website is about the same thing, there's no need to create landing pages for different phrases. (Google also frowns upon this)
I would limit the usage of the <abbr>tag to once or twice per abbreviation. You also must realize this is onpage SEO, which is great and it does help, but the majority of your ability to rank for your phrases will come from external SEO.</abbr>
-
Thanks for the response.
Would using the abbr tag every single time the abbreviated term is used be considered over the top and effectively detrimental?
Also often my pages are focused on the full phrase e.g. domain.com/football-manager-tactics.html with the full phrase in the title as well.
Would it be dangerous (spammy?) to create a separate page called domain.com/fm-tactics.html purely to help pull in results for this search term?
-
If you take a look at the Adwords Keyword Tool, you can see some phrases get more traffic than others:
- Football Manager 2012 - 27,100 exact searches per month
- fm 2012 - 8,100 exact searches
- fm2012 - 1,900 exact searches
My advice would be to continue with alternating anchor and title tags, but give more preference to phrases that get the most searches. Be sure to include all phrases in the copy of the page as well, but pay mind that the page doesn't look spammy.
Adwords Keyword Tool: <cite>https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal</cite>
Using the <abbr>tag will help. Again, don't overdo it. You will need to take time to think how you can fit all the acronyms in the content body without making it appear like you intentionally did so.</abbr>
Proper usage: <abbr title="Football Manager 2012">fm2012</abbr>
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
-
Sudden inexplicable drop in important keywords
I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report. One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause. Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean. I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that. We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week. I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong! I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up. I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs. I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday. I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year. I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated? Thanks Catherine - very stressed Mozer 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Selectaglaze1 -
Why my website disappears for the keywords ranked, then reappears and so on?
Hello to everyone. In the last 2 weeks my website emorroidi.imieirimedinaturali.it has a strange behavior in SERP: it disappears for the keywords ranked and then reappears, and so on. Here's the chronicle of the last days: 12/6: message in GWT: Improvement of the visibility of the website in search. 12/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 16/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked with some keywords higher in ranking 18/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 22/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked 24/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked... I can't explain this situation. Could it be a penalty? What Kind? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emarketer0 -
What are the best practices for microdata?
Not too long ago, Dublin Core was all the rage. Then Open Graph data exploded, and Schema seems to be highly regarded. In a best-case scenario, on a site that's already got the basics like good content, clean URLs, rich and useful page titles and meta descriptions, well-named and alt-tagged images and document outlines, what are today's best practices for microdata? Should Open Graph information be added? Should the old Dublin Core be resurrected? I'm trying to find a way to keep markup light and minimal, but include enough microdata for crawlers to get a better sense of the content and its relationships to other subdomains and sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebElaine0 -
Releasing Multiple Language Blog Articles ?
I was hoping anyone could give me some advice on my situation Our blog is a huge traffic source for us, we frequently release fresh blog articles on our English language website bringing lots of relevant traffic for a variety of different relevant topics Some of these articles would be very useful and relevant for visitors to our German website so i would like to get them translated and posted on our separate German language blog on our separate German website. The article text will not change much as the information is the same for Germany also How should i go about this without running into duplicate content issues with Google I looked into rel=alternate and realized that i cannot use this over two separate websites, i also thought about rel=canonical but it doesn't look like this would be suitable either Can anybody please give me any advice or thoughts on this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Keyword Selection - Long Tail or not long tail keyword
Hi Friends, We have a keyword "plus size clothing" but we used this as "plus size clothing 2012" to Cover the both keywords "Plus size clothing" and "Plus size clothing 2012" My question is, are we still focusing on "plus size clothing" when use "plus size clothing 2012" instead of the main keyword.? What strategy do yo suggest that when to use long tail and when to not. (when I talk to use a long tail than it means use it prominently on the page as main keyword should be used.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray0 -
Better to have one subdomain or multiple subdomains?
We have quite a bit of content we are considering subdomaining. There are about 13 topic centers that could deserve their own subdomain, but there are about 2000 original articles that we also want to subdomain. We are considering a) putting the 13 centers (i.e. babies.domain.com, acne.domain.com, etc) and the 3000 articles (on a variety of topics) on one subdomain b) putting the 13 centers on their own subdomain and the remaining 3000 articles on their own subdomain as well (14 subdomains total) What do you think is the best solution and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What is the best way to scrape serps for targeted keyword research?
Wanting to use search operators such as "KEYWORD inurl:blog" to identify potential link targets, then download target url, domain and keyword into an excel file. Then use SEOTools to evaluate the urls from the list. I see the link aquisition assistant in the Moz lab, but the listed operators are limited. Appreciate any suggestions on doing this at scale, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qualbe-Marketing-Group0 -
Best way to consolidate link juice
I've got a conundrum I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have a main container page listing a group of products, linking out to individual product pages. The problem I have is the all the product pages target exactly the same keywords as the main product page listing all the products. Initially all my product pages were ranking much higher then the container page, as there was little individual text on the container page, and it was being hit with a duplicate content penality I believe. To get round this, on the container page, I have incorporated a chunk of text from each product listed on the page. However, that now means "most" of the content on an individual product page is also now on the container page - therefore I am worried that i will get a duplicate content penality on the product pages, as the same content (or most of it) is on the container page. Effectively I want to consolidate the link juice of the product pages back to the container page, but i am not sure how best to do this. Would it be wise to rel=canonical all the product pages back to the container page? Rel=nofollow all the links to the product pages? - or possibly some other method? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770