Whiteboard Friday Live – When Keyword Targeting Gets Tough

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week we had a little bit of a mix-up. What happened is we used Livestream to film a live version of Whiteboard Friday. It was an hour long. It was tons of fun. It was super awesome. But unfortunately, due to an issue with Livestream, who we normally like, but it just had this weird error that we eventually reproduced even though we tested it beforehand. It didn’t keep and capture the video content. So, here is Whiteboard Friday – Keyword Targeting Gets Tough all over again.

Just for those of you who are wondering and worried, 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 tweet at us, and then Friday morning the video will be right there. In fact, Thursday night the video should be right there. With that said, let’s go talk about when keyword targeting gets tough.

One of the first issues I wanted to address is when we’ve got multiple keywords on a single page and a lot of people worry. They sort of say, “Well, 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 one page that targets a lot of them. How should I spread things out? What do I do with plurals? What do I do with synonyms or variations?” I think a really good rule of thumb here 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 there are three or four or five keywords that all make sense, there are plural variations, there are synonyms, etc., and that content makes sense for those users, one page is usually the best practice.

Number two, you need to be worried about natural word usage. It’s really weird to have something like keyword phrase one comma, keyword phrase two comma, keyword phrase three. 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. For all sorts of reasons, they’re just not as good for SEO from a white hat perspective. If you’re a churn and burn spammer, you probably don’t watch Whiteboard Friday.

Number three, combining those things when it makes sense. I really like combining words that go together and that make sense. Let me give you a good example here. I think that will really illustrate the point.

I’ve chosen the keyword “Batman.” Maybe I’ve got a website about comic book characters. I’ve got this 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? My sort of feeling is Batman is a global topic. It is sort of too big for anything else and it is hypercompetitive. So it’d 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 have links to the comics and all that kind of stuff. Batman comics and Batman comic books, those are a natural fit. You can do a really good job of crafting a title tag and a headline that go together really well. Batman comic books or Batman comics and comic books, those work really nicely together. So I can connect those. But graphic novels are a little different. I could do something like combine it if I felt like the intent was the same. People who are 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 comic books and graphic novels” or “Batman comics, graphic novels, and comic books.” Those three things work pretty well together. Natural word order. Those things, I would probably combine those because I think the intent is the same. Keyword targeting can be done pretty well and effectively all in the same page.

Remember, too, that it is not just about the keyword targeting. It’s about the links pointing to the page. If you’ve got lots of links pointing to one page, you want to leverage the power and importance of that page on the link graph to be able to get it to rank for many things. There are good reasons to try and combine stuff. The finally, Batman versus Joker, that’s its own thing. That’s probably its own comic book, own series. Maybe it’s a movie from the 1960s. I’m not sure. But Batman versus Joker gets its own page.

On the second piece, internal and external linking, what we want to think about is, “Well, I’m worried about these issues of where I should link to different pages and how to do it.” Actually, the Web has given us a really good methodology to think about this. It is sort of the breadcrumb methodology, and that follows a category like structure that search engines love and that humans are very used to. Users are going to have a good time with it as well. So, it makes sense, right. We’ve got the Batman page that I created. We’ve got our Batman comics and graphic novels page, and then our Batman versus Joker comic. Obviously, we’d have lots of detail pages and subcategory pages, potentially under these. The way to think about these 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. Those links, Batman is going to point back to this topic. Batman comics and graphic novels, going to point to that one. This one is going to link up. This one is going to link down. This one is going to link one level down. So you can see 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. You can see a lot of confusion sometimes. SEOs will comment like, “Ah, jeez, this page is ranking great for this keyword, but it’s not the page I wanted to rank for.” This kind of structure can help with that, but there’s also some cool advanced techniques and advanced strategies that we can talk about to solve particular issues. Some of these are pretty sweet.

The first one, the move it. This is when you’ve got a situation where the page is targeting a particular keyword – targeting Batman, targeting Batman comic and graphic novels – and you either need to move it for one reason or another or the search engine is ranking the wrong page. Maybe they’re ranking a deep comic page for Batman comics and graphic novels. You go, “Ah! This is terrible.” You can see this on SEOmoz 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 three months ago from our home page. It’s sort of weird. It’s a useful and fine page, but it is probably not the broad topic that people are looking for when they search SEO. So, we might want to do some things around that.

One potential thing is to move that old page or to rel canonical it back to the page that you want ranking. Remember that rel canonical is really only designed for duplicate content situations. So, you should only do this if the page that is ranking is a copy of the original, it has the same content, but just isn’t the one you want. Newspapers have this a lot with print versions of pages. 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.” They want to make some money.

The next one is the replace it. The idea is the old URL, the URL that is currently ranking, could use some refresher content maybe or could use an update, or you’re essentially saying it’s that URL that is ranking for this, but I really want this content on there. So, you can feel free to do that. Go ahead and 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. Every year or every couple of years for the past few, we’ve done our search ranking factors. Whenever we reproduce a new version we make sure it stays at the old URL seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors. That replacement, that new page, came up in 2007, 2009, 2011. A new one is coming again. We are essentially just replacing that content, and the old one is going to live at another location. It is going to live at seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors- 2005. So, by doing that, we make sure that all the links that were pointing into this continue to point into this. It ranks where it used to, and it is earning new links to that same old URL. Great, great tactic here.

Last, final one is the consolidation system. This is really when you’ve got content that you are potentially moving on to the page but you want to be able to directly point people to it. Yet, you think search engines are really going to appreciate having all that in one place. This is a great time to use the internal or named anchors, the hash tags. For example, if I say, “Oh, 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 that talk about the comics themselves and the history of them, etc., current comic books that are available, graphic novels. All of those on the same page. If I want, if the 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 and what we talked about today, your keyword targeting can dramatically improve and you can have these best practices to go forward with. I’m looking forward to some comments about this. I apologize again for the live version not going up. Hopefully this will help out. Take care everyone. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.