Smoothape – Mutterings and Oddities

Keywords used to be all the rage, we could add every single keyword we wanted and the search engine would love us for it as that’s how they indexed the pages. Not so any more. Google apparently doesn’t even look at your keywords. It is more interested in your content, and it will categorize you that way, thank you very much.

So why add keywords then? Well one reason springs to mind. Google is not the only search engine. Yahoo search, Bing and the 50,0000+ other engines still pay attention, but the rules have changed. No longer can add hundred of keywords or merely repeat the same keyword over and over again in the hopes that you will show in the top rankings.

Search algorithms are very complex. I doubt there is anyone who know the entire Google algorithm, we just have to launch a website, follow the general rules then tweak and tweak again until we score in the top 10 results.

So how do you use keywords now? Well it depends on many factors. Personally I would have a look at your page content and pluck the most meaningful of those words for your keywords. There are quite a few sites you can look at to judge which keywords work better than others, some keywords get thousands of searches per day, others only a few per month.

If you only use the keywords that get the most hits you will fail right away. Major sites, page with Page Rank of 7 and above, sites with thousands of pages will rank better than you for most keywords, what you really need to do is concentrate on your niche and use the long tail approach.

The long tail in a nutshell. You want to rank for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per day, you use it and get 1 visit from the search engines. You also pick 4 other keywords that get 100 searches a day, but you get 3 visits for those words or phrases. Which is more beneficial to you?

Ok, so to be on the safe side, do a few keyword searches, find out what appears, write copy for your page to use long tail and popular keywords and add between 1 and 5 keywords to each webpage on your site, try not to be repetitive.

I was asked this question recently.

“What is I find a great keyword, add it to my site a few hundred times using a font color that is the same as the background color?”

BLACKHAT! Don’t do it, you will be found out and punished, by the Search Engines, bloggers and me.

Goggle Keyword Suggestions: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal