One thing that never stops amazing me about website designers is the promise that they can give me a #1 website ranking in major search engines over night. Such results are generally as useless as they are possible. The secret to a top search engine ranking is as easy as adding one word. Or two. Or three.
From a logical point of view, I can reach a higher level of uniqueness with a complete search sentence than I could ever hope to do with a single word. By golly, I can even create a perfect seach phrase that completely defines what my site has to offer, and nobody else will have ever thought of that particular search phrase, so it’s certain to have the #1 SERP rating. The problem is, I’ll get that top rating, but it won’t give me any new site visitors, let alone sales.
The problem is about as basic as it gets. The more words you use in a single keyphrase, the more likely it is that the phrase is unique. But the more words you have to use to get that top result, the less likely you’ve made it that anyone will ever type that phrase into a search engine.
Realistically, people like to do things the easy way. I teach people to use search engines. Many times, I get frustrated doing so, because by the time I’ve opened my mouth to tell them to clarify their search a little more, they’ve already hit ENTER, and 243 billion results that have no value have appeared on the screen. Why? Because that person wants to type in one or two words and get what they are looking for. They don’t want to think about the search they are using, they want the powers that be to see a single word, send out invisible mind-reading spiders, and know exactly what they are looking for.
So now I’ve got a website that ranks number one for a keyphrase of six words, and a potential customer who finds it a major ordeal to think of more than one word to type into the search box. Do you see the paradox yet?
Before you decide on your site’s keywords and keyphrases, do some research, and determine what people who are looking for your products and services are actually using for a search query. Using a single incorrectly spelled word such as “wirting” is going to be vastly more effective than using a descriptively perfect phrase such as “professional copywriting for quality website content.”
By all means, use longer keyphrases. But concentrate on one or two word phrases that are likely to actually be used in searches. After all, if it’s lonely at the top of search engine results, you are probably sitting on the wrong pile of keywords.
Article written by SEOnotepad.com
1 Comment Received
March 16th, 2009 @10:46 pm
i guess i too am guilty as the above people who have been charged with making searches using just one word, but it only goes to show which direction your SEO efforts should be directed, i mean key phrases are all well and good but what the internet and more so google has done so beautifully is to make us lazy as hell.
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