Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Action plan: how to get listed in Google's search results for many keywords

Targeting several keywords on your website is crucial if you want to get high rankings on Google. The more keywords that are related to a special topic can be found on your website, the more likely it is that Google will find your website relevant to that topic.

There are good ways and bad ways to target multiple keywords. If you choose the wrong way, search engines will think that you are a spammer. If you choose the right way, your website will get higher rankings. The following three steps will help you to get high rankings for as many keywords as possible.

Step 1: Remove stuffed keywords from your web pages
Some webmasters think that the best way to optimize a website for multiple keywords is to add them on every web page and separate them with a comma.

These websites usually have extremely long meta tags with dozens if not hundreds of keywords. You won't get high rankings on Google with that method. Add dozens of keywords on a web page is called keyword stuffing and all search engines consider this spam. You actually risk your search engine rankings if you use this method on your web pages.

To do: Check if your web pages contain long keywords lists. If yes, remove them from your pages.

Step 2: Optimize different pages of your website for different keywords
If you add many keyword on the same web page, then the web page will be somewhat relevant to many keywords. If you optimize a web page for one keyword/keyphrase, then your web page will be very relevant to this keyword.

It is much easier to get high rankings if the web page is very relevant to the searched keyword. For that reason, you should optimize as many pages of your website for as many keywords as possible.

The keywords for which you optimize your web pages should be related. If you have a shoe shop, optimize different pages of your website for the keywords sports shoes, sneakers, sandals and boots. By having optimized web pages for these keywords, you show Google that your website is relevant to the topic shoes.

To do: Find the best keywords for your website and then optimize different pages of your website for different keywords.

Step 3: Add keyword modifiers and combine these variations
In step two, you have optimized your web pages for keywords such as sneakers and sandals. The next step is to add modifiers to these keywords on your optimized pages. For example, the sneakers page could include these keyword variations: sneakers shop, nike sneakers, cool sneakers, etc.

It's usually a good idea to combine all of these keyword variations in one sentence (for example for your web page title): Buy cool Nike sneakers in our sneakers shop in London. With this single sentence, your web page can be found for many keyword combinations that are included in this sentence.

To do: Find keyword modifiers and add different keyword variations to your optimized pages.

If you optimize many pages of your website for different but related keywords and if you add variations of each keyword to each page than the content of your web site will be perfectly optimized for high rankings on Google.

If you combine optimized content with good inbound links, your website will get the best possible rankings on Google and other search engines.

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