Myth 4 – Targetting A Few Keywords
Video Summary
Have you ever heard a “guru” saying to target just a few keywords and get top search engine rankings for them? I sure have… all the time. In fact, some marketers make a mint from selling you keyword research software to “uncover” the “best” keywords.
Don’t Do It!
If you target specific keywords, your writing will be un-natural and you’ll miss out on hundreds or thousands of free visitors from long tail search results. In the video I show you that the 37,700 people who visited my site from search engines used 10,500 DIFFERENT search phrases!
That blows my mind. How can there possibly be over 10,000 phrases in my UK-specific technology niche? Not just that, but my 5-month-old site RANKS well enough for those 10,000 phrases to have received at least one click for each phrase!
So, whether you write articles for your websites, or posts for your blogs, be sure to use as many theme keywords as you can in a natural style. You’ll reap the rewards in ranking for many, many different keyword phrases.
What do you think
Have you tried to get traffic for one keyword at a time and seen poor results? Will you now try to write broadly and generate traffic from hundreds or thousands of keywords instead?
Neil,
I’m fascinated to know how you get 10,469 different keywords into one site!
Conventional net wisdom says that Google ignores the keywords meta-tag, or is this another traffic myth?
10,469 keywords is a 100+ keywords/page on a 100 page site.
Do tell!
Interesting research. Curious which site that is. Did you “Theme” the site? Did you do any special onsite seo planning?
Very Intersesting I need to know more about it so that I can have a better understanding thanks for sharing And then I can see how do I succeed on creating my own web site.
But how do you target so many keywords? I know you can only do so much by hyperlinking SEO, PPC and other normal traffic targetting methods. Please tell us more…
Hi Neil, you are so right. There are arguments for and against targeting sites for keywords. Fact is you do not need to write any content in support of a keyword if the keyword is a long tail. The search engines will find them no matter.
I have recently put up a website that has not been promoted but regularly receives traffic simply on the basis that the site has thousands of long tail keywords uploaded to it.
Keep up your good work in educating us about what you have found to work over the long term.