Content Writing Advice - Parts of Keywords
Posted by John Jones on 29 Feb 2008 at 07:25 am | Tagged as: Content Writing Advice
One thing I’ve always liked to share with my clients is
that when they write content for their website that they should always consider
the parts of keywords and not just the keywords themselves. I personally think
both the actual keyword and the parts of the keyword are vitally important.
I have clients that rank well within the search engines for keywords they aren’t
even purposefully targeting. It just so happens that parts of the actual keyword
are found within the content of the page that they have written.
When giving this content writing advice to my Realtor clients I like to use
the following example:
“Tahoe Tyrol is nestled just South of Heavenly Ski Resort and many of
the luxury homes overlook the beautiful lake”….
Notice that within this sentence I my focus is on Tahoe Tyrol which is a fairly
pricy community in South Lake Tahoe California. By picking apart this sentence
I could potentially find myself ranking for the following keywords without actually
including them into the content.
- Tahoe Tyrol luxury homes
- Lake Tahoe luxury homes
- Lake Tahoe homes
- South Lake Tahoe luxury homes
- South Lake Tahoe homes
The above terms are specific to my audience but there are a few keywords that
I might ‘accidentally’ end up ranking well for as well; they are:
- Heavenly Ski Resort
- Luxury lake homes
- Luxury homes
- Lake homes
- Tahoe ski resort
- Heavenly Tahoe
Some of these terms are actually found within the sentence like ‘Heavenly Ski
Resort’ and ‘luxury homes’. However they weren’t actually keywords I purposefully
wanted to target when writing the content.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
- : 4.5
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WHat about the possiblity of ranking for bad terms because of this…Say…You provide a warning about a sex offender from your site, could it spit out “Your Name Sex offender”
Thankfully there are tools like SEO Digger that allow you to get a general idea on what keywords you might be ranking for. Upon finding one of these unfortunate rankings you can always find the offending content and rewrite it.
Using your example, if you must use the words sex and offender in your content then I’d suggest hitting up a thesaurus to see if you can’t change offender to something else.
From a completely non SEO point of view, I’m sure that any visitor who stumbles upon my marketing blog will determine that I’m not the sex offender … or sex transgressor (using Thesaurus.com for assistance) they are looking for.
I might also add that your comment brings up a wonderful argument about traffic being traffic. Not all traffic is worth having…
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
That’s true, If I get any traffic for “people with foot and mouth disease”, it won’t actually be worth anything to me.
I don’t know if I actually agree with the traffic being useless to you. You ranking for the keywords will be useless to the traffic sure but I disagree with your statement.
Consider this…
Looking at some statistics I have on this blog I found that some of the keywords I rank for are actually relevant to marketing but i’ve not really written anything on the topic. I could if I wanted to spend some time on that focus and capitalize on that traffic.
Alternatively, if you start to rank well for ‘foot disease’ or ‘mouth disease’ and you get a decent amount of traffic from those terms then it might be worth your time to branch out into those niche topics with different domains since you already know you can rank well for them.
Just some added thoughts…
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Lets back up a little bit then off of actual traffic, because I think I agree with you. Once they are on your site, they may be looking for info on the other subject but may become interested, or remember your site…
However,
If you are ranking for a odd term, but you did a good job on your title and description, people seeing you in the serps will most likely not click through because your tags are doing a good job of describing the actual content on the page and not that bogus term. So, I would say not all rankings are very *useful*, not to say worthless.
If you built your Title & Meta Description right then you are right that there is a likely chance that the visitor will stop at the result displayed within the search engine since it doesn’t reference the term completely OR is obviously different.
On the other hand though you will get some curious onlookers wondering what the hell you are doing ranking for such terms. These are probably competitors watching those terms. If that is the case then it might be fun to poke fun at them a little or maybe even solicit services… after all if you were able to get a site ranking for related terms in their industry that isn’t even about their industry then imagine how much more successful you can be working on a site that is actually in the industry.
Well at least that is the thought process. Might be easier said then done though.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
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