True Blue SEO: 3 Things I Learned About Keywords

After a year and half of Digitalapplejuice.com, I have learned 3 things about keywords.

1. Keyword stuffing is just bad SEO.

There are thousands of websites and consultants out there that promise to produce immediate results with their almost mystical knowledge of SEO and their clairvoyant understanding of the use of keywords. They will talk of keyword density and keyword combinations, alt text keywords and on and on and on.

The truth is much more complicated than this. If you are not bidding on keywords for ad purposes, then the importance of the “right” keyword is diminished.

If you are writing about cats that eat dinner with a spoon attached to their paw, adding keywords like “silverware” is not going to increase your traffic much. Your subject should define your keywords.

On the other hand, if you are writing timely material for which you expect a lot of competition, then the choice of keyword can greatly increase your traffic. According to The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, when Heath Ledger died, The Huffington Post managed a #1 placement on Google by adding “Leger” to their keyword list, capitalizing on the misspelling of the actor’s last name even though they were not the primary source of the story. Other online publications quickly followed suit.

In fact, HuffPo claims a keyword expert on staff who tags each post and tweaks that day’s keywords as the day progresses.

Another example:

If you peek behind the curtain at Smash Magazine, specifically their story about 404 pages, you will notice that their meta description and keywords are actually based on the content of the first two paragraphs of the post. There is no endless combination list of 404 + something. This is just an organic description of the content of the post.

And still, if you google “404″, Smash Magazine appears within the top five.

Want to increase your site’s visibility? Make all your domain links”pretty links”. So instead of  http://www.your domain.com/page1.html, use something germane to the content of that page like http://yourdomain.com/smith-family-picnic.html.

If you are using wordpress, read the wordpress codex on premalinks carefully BEFORE you choose your permalinks structure.

As for keywords,  if you are blogger and use Wordpress, install the All-in-One SEO plug-in. If you don’t have the time or inclination to write keywords or tags or specify a page title for each post, the plug-in will attempt to automatically generate keywords from your content, use the post title as part of the webpage title and incorporate the blog name as well. For most sites, this is enough.

If you have an html site, the best scenario is that you write keywords that are relevant to the content of each page. Yes, that means writing keywords for every page.

2. Said another way, too many keywords, too many tags on any one page will not get you the traffic you want. If it does anything at all, it will just increase your bounce rate.

The actual definition of bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits. This definition doesn’t work for us. Most of our visitors come specifically for the Illustrator tutorial or the Lens Baby review.

My definition of bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your site within the first 10 seconds of arriving because they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Back when I slaved away for a boss and a meager paycheck, I had a boss who took a seminar at the local chamber of commerce. She came back with all the knowledge in the world about keywords. When it came time to bid on keywords, she handed me a list containing 200 keyword combinations starting with “Miami”, “location”, and “photography”. (The company booked locations in and around South Florida for print and TV advertising)

I suggested that her keywords were too broad but she insisted. So I bid on them. What do you think happened? Within a few days we had a bill for over $300 (and growing). The bulk of the inquiries were from people wanting help booking sites for weddings, or help booking hotels on the beach, not from photographers or advertising agencies looking for shooting locations in the greater Miami area.

A wiser approach would have been to test out keyword combinations. If keywords are really important to you, and your whole advertising model is based on keywords, then you MUST test your keyword combinations. Create different landing pages for different keyword phrases or combinations. I suspect you will find that 80% of your keyword phrases don’t attract a single visitor to your site.

3. Write. Just write. Write every day. Forget about keywords and keyword density.

I think that the “science” of keywords is only relevant to static sites that rarely update their content or sites that are regurgitating copy from other sites and need to best the source of the text in the rankings. (see Huffington Post).

If you are a blogger, you are probably writing about stuff that interests you. If you are consistently writing about ponies, and different types of ponies and what ponies eat, then your content will define the keywords meant to attract people who are interested in ponies. The writing will be natural and appealing and readers will enjoy visiting your site.

However, if you have been reading too many out-of-date SEO books and websites, you may decide to exercise a concept called “keyword density”. I hate the whole concept. If you are able to discern what the correct keyword density is supposed to be, mazel tov. But all the sites that speak of this concept sternly warn you that the wrong keyword density can either diminish the optimum benefit or get you flagged for “keyword spamming”.

So let’s say that you decide your keyword ratio should be 3% to 8% . If you think about this rationally, 1 in 20 words will be a keyword. Really. Try that. Try writing a coherent 250-word story with 5% keywords. Not only is it difficult to do, its difficult to read.

Screw the keyword density. Screw the whole concept of keywords. Just write. There are ways to increase your traffic. Keywords are not the way. Trust me.

How do I know? Our blog is an SEO nightmare. We write about Photoshop, and Illustrator and Pixelmator, and dozens of other software programs, and we write about artists and how to sell art. We write about comic books, and conventions and software and Lensbabies. Sometimes we even write opinions. There is no way to weedle our keyword list to ten strong candidates.

Our SEO approach has become very straight forward–the main subject of the story is always named in the title, the keywords are usually gleaned out of the content. And we don’t worry about keyword density. This very simple approach actually works.

You know what our most fruitful keyword is? Photofunia. 5% of our daily traffic is the direct result of googling “Photofunia”. For an article written more than 6 months ago.

Go figure.

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