Dangerous Thinking

I’ve written a few days ago about the importance of choosing the right key phrases for SEO copy and the halo effect from the chosen key phrases.

But why do we work with key phrases rather than key words? Surely ‘cheese’ is a more desirable target for optimization than ‘farmhouse cheddar cheese’? More people will be making searches containing ‘cheese’ than phrases containing ‘cheese’ and one or more other words.

Well, it may have made sense, many years ago when there were far fewer sites on the Web, but these days targeting ‘cheese’ to get a first page position would take a long time and a huge budget.

So the clever money goes for niches, targeted using key phrases rather than words.

Although there’s another reason for targeting key phrases that many people miss. If you try for a reasonable density of key words on your page, you’ll almost certainly end up with a page that screams that it’s optimized and will be very difficult to read. Try using a three-word key phrase and notice that you need to use it far fewer times in the copy.

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