When Keyword Targeting Gets Tough - Whiteboard Friday Live

Key Takeaways

[Music] how doas fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday uh last week we had a little bit of a mixup so what happened is we used live stream to film a live version of whiteboard Friday last an hour long was tons of fun was super awesome uh but unfortunately due to an issue with live stream uh who we normally like but just had this weird error that that we eventually reproduced even though we tested it beforehand uh didn't keep and capture the video content and so here is uh whiteboard Friday keyword targeting gets tough all over again and just for those of you who are wondering and worried uh in the future live whiteboard Fridays will always be followed up by a recording of that so we might end up actually doing them Thursday night so you can watch Thursday after work live and tweeted us and then Friday morning video will be right there in fact Thursday night the video should be right there so uh with that said let's go talk about when keyword targeting gets tough so one of the first issues I wanted to address it was is when we've got multiple keywords on a single page and a lot of people worry they sort of say uh well I'm I know that I'm trying to Target a bunch of different keywords I don't know whether I should have an individual page for each one or maybe I should have uh one page that targets a lot of them uh how should I spread things out what do I do with plural what do I do with synonyms or variations and I think a really good rule of thumb here uh is to keep in mind a few things number one the intent of the users if what users are going to find on the page is useful to those people and and there's three or four or five keywords that all make sense there's plural variations there's synonyms Etc and that content makes sense for those users one page is usually a best practice number two you need to be worried about natural word usage it it's really weird to have something like uh you know keyword phrase one comma keyword phrase 2 comma keyword phrase three and those pages you can see them getting fewer Clicks in the search results so even if you are ranking you might not perform as well people are less likely to link to them uh for all sorts of reasons they're just not as good for SEO from a white hat perspective you know if you're a churn and burn spammer you probably don't watch whiteboard Friday uh and number three combining those things when it makes sense right so I really like combining words uh that go together and that make sense let me give you a good example here I think that'll really illustrate the point so I've chosen the keyword Batman right maybe I've got a website about uh comic book characters right so I've got this uh keyword Batman I know I want to go after Batman comics I want to go after Batman graphic novels Batman comic books Batman versus Joker which of these things do you think I'd put together and my sort of feeling is Batman is a global topic it's sort of too big for anything else and it's hyper competitive so be really tough to Target other things on there I might go with Batman as its own separate page just one page on the site all about the character and you know have links to the comics and that kind of stuff Batman comics and Batman comic books those are a natural fit and you can do a really good job right of of crafting a title tag and a headline that go together really well right so uh Batman comic books or Batman comics and comic books uh those work really nicely together and so I can go those Batman graphic novels is a little different I could do something like combine it if I felt like the intent was the same right so people who were coming searching for graphic novels are also looking for Comics or comic fans are also looking for graphic novels I could do something like Batman uh comic books and graphic novels or Batman comics graphic novels and comic books right and those three things work pretty well together natural word order so those things I I would probably combine those because I think the intent is the same keyword targeting can be done pretty well and effectively all on the same page remember too that it's not just about the keyword targeting it's about the links pointing to the page if you got lots of links pointing to one page you want to leverage the power and importance uh of that page on the link graph to be able to get it to rank for many things so there's there's good reasons to try and combine stuff and then finally Batman versus Joker that's that's its own thing right that's probably its own comic book own series maybe it's a movie from the 60s I'm not sure but Batman versus Joker gets his own page so in the second piece internal and external linking what we want to think about is well you know I'm worried about these uh issues of where I should link to different pages and how to do it and actually the web has given us a really good methodology to think about this and it's sort of the breadcrumb methodology and that and that follows a category like structure that search engines love and that humans are very used to so users are going to have a good time with it as well so makes sense right we got our Batman page that I created we got our Batman comics and graphic novels page and our Batman versus Joker comic and obviously we'd have lots of detail pages and subcategory Pages potentially under these but the way to think about this is in breadcrumb format so on this Batman versus Joker comic page I'd have a breadcrumb that looks like this Batman Batman comics Batman versus Joker right and those links Batman's gonna Batman is going to point back to this topic Batman comics and graphic novels going to point to that one right and this one's going to link up and this one's going to link down and this one's going to link one level down so you can see that that level structure creates a really nice easy to follow thing for search engines they know aha someone's looking for the broad Batman topic that's my page someone's looking for Batman comics or Batman graphic novels that's the guy someone's looking for Batman versus Joker comic this is my guy and you can see a lot of confusion sometimes seos will comment like ah geez this page is ranking great for this keyword but it's not the page I wanted to rank for and this kind of structure can help with that but there's also some cool Advanced Techniques uh and advanced strategies that we can talk about to solve particular issues some of these are pretty sweet so first one the move it so this is when you've got a situation where the page is targeting a particular keyword right so targeting Batman targeting backman comic and graphic novels and you either need to move it for one reason or another or the search engines ranking the wrong page maybe they're ranking a deep comic page uh for Batman comics and graphic novels you go ah this is this is terrible uh you can see this on SEO mods right now if you search for SEO on the front page it's our web developers SEO cheat sheet that's ranking it switched about 3 months ago from our homepage that's sort of weird it's a useful and fine page but it's probably not the broad topic that people are looking for when they search SEO so we might want to do some things around that and one potential thing is to move that old page or to Rel canonical it back to uh the page that you want ranking remember that real canonical is really only designed for duplicate content situations so you should only do this if the page that's ranking is a copy of the original and has the same content but just isn't the one you want newspapers have this a lot with print versions of pages right where a print version will be ranking and they go no no I don't want the print version I want the one that shows the ads because they want to make some money uh the next one is the replace it and the idea is the old URL the URL that's currently ranking uh could use some refresher content maybe or could use an update or you're essentially saying like oh it's that URL that's ranking for this but I really want this content on there and so you can feel free to do that right go ahead and swap swap out the content put in the new content and maybe recreate the old page at a new URL let me give you a good example of this one so every year uh or every couple years for the past few we've done our search ranking factors right whenever we reproduce a new version we make sure it stays at the old URL you know the.org search ranking factors that replacement that new page came up in 2007 2009 2011 it's a new one's coming again right and we're essentially just replacing that content and the old one is going to live at at another location it's going to live at search ranking factor2 2005 right so by doing that we make sure that all the links that we're pointing into this continue to point into this it ranks where it used to uh and it's earning new links to that same old URL great great tactic here last final one is the consolidation system and this is really when you've got uh content that you are potentially moving onto the page but you want to be able to directly Point people to it uh and yet you think search engines are really going to appreciate having all of that in one place and this is a great time to use the internal or named anchors right the hash the hashtag so for example if I say oh you know today I have a Batman comic page a Batman comic books page a Batman comics page and a Batman graphic novels page those should really all be one I might think about having different sections right that talk about uh the comics themselves right and the history of them Etc Uh current comic books that are available graphic novels uh and all of those on the same page but if I want if a user is interested in just the graphic novels they can still link and drop to exactly this section on that page all right so hopefully given these strategies uh and what we talked about today your keyword targeting can dramatically improve uh and you can have these best practices to go forward with I'm looking forward to some comments about this uh I and I apologize again for the live version not going up hopefully this will help out so take care everyone we'll see you again next week for another edition of whiteboard Friday