In the old days of SEO, people used to cram every keyword they thought they wanted to target into the appropriate Meta tag. It’s a practice that the search engines don’t much like these days – hands up if you’re still keyword stuffing – and the most savvy SEO practitioners are focused where the search engines focus, on the page content.
At Web Positioning Centre, we optimize pages on three carefully selected key phrases, a practice that sometimes leads to a client feeling short-changed. “What about ‘caerphilly cheese’ and ‘caerphilly cheese makers’?”, they say, when we show our analysis that indicates that ‘caerphilly cheese making’ is the most effective niche for their online dairy outlet.
The answer is that we’re not excluding related key phrases, and we will get some traction on them, because the interaction beween our optimized copy and the search engines is much broader than just on the selected key phrases – the search engines read and analyze all the content, and they go a step further, too.
Their ‘understanding’ of the copy means they’ll associate the page with other related searches, too. OK, there won’t be such an exact fit with these other key phrases, but they’re key phrases we’ve rejected because they don’t fit the site as well as the alternatives, or they’re just too much like hard work – and high budgets!
But you will get a spread (a ‘halo effect’) around your key phrases. So don’t worry that you’ll be losing out.
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