How and Where to Use Keyword s

These phrases will be used on your specific product, service, or content pages.

For example, let’s use a website that sells house plans online:

Primary Keyword Phrase : “house plans” Specific variations : “country house plans” “luxury house plans” “Cape Cod house plans”

Notice how the Primary Keyword Phrase is contained within the more specific phrases? This is the ideal situation to achieve.

Do not try to go after generic keywords or single words. How difficult do you think it would be to get a top ranking for, say “computers”? You’d be competing with over 52 million other web pages!

If your site is comprised of totally separate categories of products or services (such as baby diapers and garage door openers for example), or if you sell to completely different bases of customers, you should consider splitting your website into multiple sites, with each site containing one category.

What are your Secondary Keyword Phrases?

After using WordTracker, you should also have a list of phrases that do not have as high of a KEI rating as your Primary Keyword Phrase but are nonetheless also relevant. These are your Secondary Keyword Phrases that, while also highly relevant to your website or business, are not searched on as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Using the example above, here are some Secondary Keyword Phrases for house plans using WordTracker:

Secondary Keyword Phrases : “home plans” “home designs” “houseplans ”

Secondary Keyword Phrases should also be used on your site, just not as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Specialized Keyword Phrases Convert Better

The more specialized, niche and targeted your keyword phrase is, the more targeted your audience, the more qualified the potential traffic and hence the greater the sales conversion rate will be on

your site. Do not discount keywords just because WordTracker shows a low traffic count value - singly they may not bring much traffic but collectively they can. Studies have shown that a large percentage of search is very targeted and specific.

Don’t try to rank highly on one-word and even some 2-word phrases and instead try 3, 4 and 5-word phrases. These are MUCH easier to rank well for because the majority of your competitors aren't using them. One easy way is to put a geographic modifier in the keyword phrase. If you are a veterinarian in Seattle for example, stop trying to optimize for the competitive “veterinary clinics” phrase and instead try for “Seattle veterinary clinics” since your business is confined to that geographical area anyway.

Put another way, focus on depth, not breadth on your site. Google also stated this at the last Webmasterworld conference.

Putting it All Together

Now that you have your list of best and most important keyword phrases, here is the general strategy of how to use them on your web pages. Exactly how to optimize your use of keywords on your web pages is the subject of the entire next section.

The general rule of thumb is that you optimize each page for ideally no morethantwodifferent keyword phrases.

Each page should include your Primary Keyword Phrase. Your home page should also contain your best Secondary Keyword Phrase. Each product, service, or content page should also contain the best specific variation to your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Because your home page is generally the one that gets the highest ranking, and is linked to most from other sites, you need to place special emphasis on the use of your Primary Keyword Phrase there. Your home page will then link to other pages on your site that contain (and are optimized for) your other, more specific, keyword phrases.

Using the example again for “house plans”, here would be the general strategy:

Home page : optimize for “house plans” (primary phrase) and “home plans” (best secondary phrase).

Country House Plans page : optimize for “country house plans” phrase and any other variations, such as “French country house plans”. Note how these phrases already contain the Primary Keyword phrase within them. This is the ideal situation to achieve.

French Country House Plans page : optimize for “French country house plans” phrase.

Contact Us page : include the phrase “house plans” several times on the page. This is because this page, along with the other “fluff” pages that are sites, are not really relevant against any specific keyword phrase. So use your Primary Keyword Phrase here.

About Us page : again, include “house plans” phrase several times on the page for the same reason as the Contact Us page.

This example, while being quite general, nonetheless should give you an idea of how to proceed.

Now let’s look at how and where to use these on your web site correctly.