Why One Or Two Keyword SEO Is A Recipe For Disaster
Posted by Andy Williamson on June 04, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing
Often when I’m skulking around SEO forums for any interesting search engine gossip or the latest Google algorithmic theories and hunches I come across one particular very dangerous breed of webmaster who seems to be determined to build an on-line business on a foundation of pure high speed quicksand, they treat their business like the ultimate extreme sport, knowing at any moment the whole lot could come tumbling down round their ears.
Who are these dangerous and most extreme of online entrepreneurs? Well they’re very easy to spot on the forums - they say things like. “I only need these 2 keywords at the top of Google and I’ll be laughing”, or “just 8 more places up and I’ll be there, my dreams fulfilled”. Have you ever found yourself thinking along the lines of ‘I just need a few more places in Google?’ You’re pretty sure all will be rosy if you can just bag the #1 slot? Don’t go there before you’ve discovered why being a keyword top 10 junkie could well be the perfect recipe for business and financial meltdown.
At this point in the article I need to pause as I have a hard and unpleasant confession that needs to be made. I’m a reformed keyword junkie, yes you heard it - I used to be addicted to ranking! And just like the chemical type junkies I lived my life for my daily fix of top 5 slots in Google, I used to spend hours every week monitoring my top 5 positions like a half crazed stock broker at the pinnacle of an economic bubble, buy Enron, sell Enron, buy Enron, deep down I knew it could burst at any second but I just couldn’t help myself. Then one day with a small rather diminutive pop that didn’t even reach the small entries of my local evening news, Google updated the algorithm and I was to be seen no more, I spent the next week frantically scanning forums, news and seo websites for any clues as to why Google had dropped me, they hadn’t so much fired me as just demoted me a few levels to the mid 20s, no big deal really apart from one tiny little fact…
85% of my entire income came from the 4 main keywords that up until a few days earlier I’d had in the top 10. Now remember at this point I’m full time, the day job is history, but as of yet the mortgage is most definitely not, the 85% income drop didn’t mean missing a few nights out on the town, it meant potentially giving up those little essentials like a roof over my head! I panicked, I stayed calm, I panicked some more, then I started some long over due keyword cold turkey - I can tell you weaning yourself off of a serious keyword addiction is one of the hardest forms of cold turkey out there.... OKAY maybe there are worse addictions but up to this point my only other weakness had been Walker’s Salt and Vinegar crisps (or chips if you’re of the US webmaster variety), and to be honest Walker’s invented a low fat variety meeting me half way so I escaped the worst of the withdrawal, plus you never need to cut down on the crisps while staring into the face of financial meltdown.
So why did Google knock me down without so much a sorry or oops? Well, truth is I don’t have a clue - they put me back 2 months later so I couldn’t have done anything too evil in G’s book of webmaster naughties, it was simply just an algorithmic blip, and that’s where it gets really scary. Imagine I was running a business where I lost 85% of the profit overnight and didn’t have a clue why, and worse I didn’t know if I’d ever get it back again!
I learnt the hard way, SEO is an incredibly important skill to develop if you’re planning on an on-line career, but keyword addiction is a whole different kettle of fish and can lead to serious problems in the future - over dependency on any single keyword in the organic search results for paying one’s life bills is just plain reckless. Rather than finding out in the same unpleasant manner that I did, try to develop a more rounded and mature SEO strategy as follows: -
Try to make all of you content worthy of a reasonable rank on the search engines, make sure the title describes exactly what the article is about, a clever trick that can sometimes be very effective is to construct a title from the very query that the searcher will enter. Let’s say you’re running a DIY website and during your keyword research you see that people enter “What is the best wood treatment for garden decking?” then, why not use that as the article title and use a subtitle “My cool DIY website takes a look at the 5 most popular wood treatments for garden decking, find out which treatment is best for your decking” - now if you also include that subtitle in the meta-description tag that people will see in the search result it has a good chance of ranking well because it makes an exact fit with a related search question and you stand a good chance of getting a click as the sub-section in the meta-description confirms that you have the very information the searcher is looking for. By the way also make sure you do really have the right answer, that way you’re most likely to get a happy visitor who bookmarks your site and returns for future DIY advice without using the search engines, further eliminating any symptoms of keyword addiction you may have.
Follow wise SEO page layout practice, make sure your heading is in an H1 tag - use H2 and H3 for sub-headings, don’t use abbreviations unless they are actually more common than the full word e.g., DIY - if you’re not sure use both full and abbreviated terms. Now relax sit down and focus on building a vault of useful and descriptive articles, some will rank well others not, however over time you will see that your earnings from the search engines become more stable and as you shift your focus from ranking high to providing a vault of useful information and facts about your chosen topic you’ll notice a marked growth in non search engine traffic, from repeat visits to links from other websites who rate your content.
Finally, and this is the best part of all, you’ll start to get quality back links and build both reputation and trust which means you stand a really good chance of nabbing those keywords you always wanted in the first place, this time however they’ll account for far less of your total traffic/income and they’re far more likely to withstand the affects of any significant algorithm updates.
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