Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

There is a good article on the ISEDB website by Karon Thackston on trusted copy. It outlines a variety of the less-known aspects of your onsite content (that's right - onsite optimization still counts). While I believe one of the points she makes could use more clarification, the overall advice is excellent.

Rather than send you directly to the article right now wondering what the point I would clarify is, I will provide a link that will open in a new window to the article here and below outline what I believe needs a bit of clarification:

She wrote:
For instance, let's say one keyphrase you're working with in your copy is "flat monitor." I've preached for years that keyphrases work best when all the words remain in their exact order. That is, when you use the entire phrase "flat monitor" as opposed to only using the single words "flat" and "monitor" individually. Matt confirms this by saying relevance and trust might be increased in Google's eyes when the words "flat" and "monitor" are used next to each other.

While this is true it is not license to race out and brutalize all your content to insure that your keywords are crammed together in the order you want them for search queries. There are three points that need to be considered:

1. The content must read properly (and I'm sure Karen would agree whole-heartedly). To insure that your keywords are always placed in the exact order of the search query targeted you likely will end up with poorly read content which may get you traffic but the traffic isn't much good is everyone leaves your site after reading the first couple sentences, and
2. How unnatural will it appear that every instance of your keywords always appear in a specific order? Quite unnatural I would say. As a rule of thumb I we try to insure that about 50% of the keywords are used in the order or close to it of the search query we're targeting, the other 50% we use separated, and
3. Most of us are targeting multiple phrases on a single page (especially the homepage). What is a webmaster to do if they, like Beanstalk, are targeting multiple-related phrases. For example, while we are targeting about a dozen-or-so phrases on our homepage two of the more important ones are "seo service" and "seo firms". If you look at the phrases you'll see that following the advice given would be impossible (at least in any language that I know of).