Keyword Questions and Answers - Beyond Keywords Themselves

Some questioners concern themselves with the quantity of keywords they should use, and how to choose the right ones from a longer list. The tricky aspect to knowing whether you're choosing the right number of keywords, though, is that there isn't an easy answer to this. As as SEO Chat forum member cnich007 noted, what you're really targeting isn't keywords as much as the right niche. “You might find your niche isn't even profitable and find yourself coming up with a different direction for your site while researching your keywords.” He suggested 50 for a blog with just a handful of pages, and around 300 for a website with 30+ pages.

It's worth keeping in mind, though, that a good blog can grow from a few pages to more than 100 over the course of a year or less. But cnich007 does make a valid point about niches: “If your niche is too broad (like 'traveling') you'll never win any keywords. If it's too narrow (like how penguins mate) then you'll never find profitable keywords. You need to find something in the middle.”

If you've been doing SEO for a while, you know that you can track the keywords that searchers use to find your site. And if you're developing a diversity of keywords, you may be wondering (as one of the posters to SEO Chat did) how the number of different keywords searchers used to find your site over the course of a month measures up. In this case, the poster was wondering if “visits from 180 different keywords” in one month when 67 percent of his traffic came from search engines was a good statistic.

The best answer to this question came from realityhack, who stated quite bluntly that “It depends.” He cited at least three considerations: the type of site, its total traffic, and the site's size and how tightly it's targeted. As you'd expect, small niche sites would see traffic coming from fewer keywords than more general sites (such as Amazon). Still, even a niche site can see traffic arriving from a diversity of keywords if it features a lot of content because “The more content you have...the more oddball key phrase will be present on your page (especially with customer reviews) so Google will see that keyword you never thought of in the review and send someone your way,” realityhack observed.

Rather than focusing on statistics like this, realityhack focuses in on what really matters: “Are they relevant keywords? Is the traffic bouncing or converting? Are you making money?”

I'll focus on one more keyword-related question. Normally we discourage forum members from posting on threads which haven't received any posts in nearly a year, but this one (http://forums.seochat.com/keywords-30/oh-my-keywords-313758.html) was something of an exception, because the original poster was still around and gave an update on her situation.

Dr. Marie, the original poster, noted at the start of the thread that she'd been targeting two keywords with one of her websites for about a year. She then launched an affiliate program and one of her affiliates wrote a blog post about the service. His blog post made it to the number five position on Google for her keywords, but her site sat at number 10. It was particularly irksome in a way, because his site had very little to do with those keywords, except for that one post.

Some of you may be wondering how this is possible; the veterans among you may have already figured it out. His site was older than Dr. Marie's, and she admitted that it “likely has a good number more authoritative links.” EGOL, perhaps the most respected member of our forums at SEO Chat, observed that “This is a good lesson... Lots of people syndicate their content. If heavyweight sites start grabbing it and posting it and ranking above you then they are going to get your traffic, your links, and your sales.”

This keyword story has not one, but two happy endings. The affiliate, whose site has been around since 2002, turned out to be a good guy, and when Dr. Marie pointed out that “his single blog post rated higher in the SERPs than my site he was nice enough to put some links on his site with appropriate anchor text to help me out.” But the kind of boost he got from the age of his site was not insurmountable to someone with Dr. Marie's dedication. A year later on the same thread, she noted “For that keyword the affiliate of mine is no longer on the first page. And, I am hovering between #1 and #2.” Hard work DOES pay off!