~~~~Question of the Week~~~~
A side note about today's question of the week. When we received this
question, I understood Tony to be asking about his meta tag keywords,
when he talked about keywords. However, Heather, who sees things from
the copywriting end, assumed Tony was talking about keywords in his
actual body text. Since you CAN'T have high rankings without BOTH of
these things working in conjunction with each other, Heather and I
decided to answer this question in tandem.
Heather will first discuss what to do from the copywriting point of
view (because you absolutely need your visible text copy created
before you can even begin to think about meta tags), and then I will
discuss how to incorporate what you've done with your text copy, into
your meta tags.
This should be fun! - Jill
~~~~~~
From: Tony Wilson
When it comes to writing keywords, I have created a bit of a mental
block for myself.
I came up with the following list:
credit card debt consolidation, mortgages, home equity mortgage loans,
Innovative purchases, FHA, automated online approval application,
home improvement loans, bad perfect excellent lines of credit, 100%
125% LTV Loans, no equity loans, fast closings, 1st 2nd cash out
mortgages
I have been told that if the search engine can match the words I type
in to any combination of the words in the keyword list, I will have a
match. For example, suppose I typed "home equity loan" into a search
engine, and was hoping to have this page come up. My understanding is
that it should, because "home equity mortgage loans" is a keyword
under my scenario, and "home equity loan" is a subset of that keyword.
Is this logic valid? Have I been told the truth?
Tony Wilson
~~~Heather's Successful Online Writing Response~~~
Since you have that great keyphrase list, let's talk about how you can
structure your text so your writing maximizes your chances of search
engine success.
From a copywriting perspective, it's best to cover your bases and use
ALL keyphrase combinations throughout your site. For instance, even
if "home equity loan" is a subset of "home equity mortgage loans,"
you should consider them as two completely different and searchable
phrases and work them both into the text.
Before you start writing, it's a good idea to fine-tune your desired
keyphrases with a specialized database like Word Tracker
(http://www.wordtracker.com.) It's entirely possible that one
variation, like "home equity loan," pulls better than your other
keyphrase "home equity mortgage loans." If the predicted hits for,
say, "home equity loan" are strong - and the other phrase doesn't pull
as well - focus on "home equity loan" when you're writing your home
page.
Remember, you can always optimize for "home equity mortgage loans" on
your inner pages. This way, your home page (which is the most
important for the search engines) utilizes your most crucial
keyphrases - and your other phrases are still well represented.
As a side note, I noticed that you had some one-word keywords in there
like "FHA" and "mortgages." Beware! As we discussed last issue,
optimizing for one-word keywords is incredibly competitive and almost
impossible to do. Sure, you can include them in your text whenever
possible - it certainly can't hurt. However, don't figure you're
going to come up as #1 for "mortgages". Your best bet is to stick
with strong keyphrases and optimize for them.
Thanks for your question! Keep 'em coming! - Heather
~~~Jill's Meta Tag Response~~~
Heather touched upon the fact that one page of a website cannot be the
be-all end-all with respect to your keyword phrases. You simply
cannot expect to rank high for all of the keywords you have mentioned
in your example above, with only one page of your website. Too many
sites try to be everything with their main home page and stuff their
meta tags accordingly.
The trick is to first follow Heather's advice and choose a few
particular phrases that you want to try and rank high with for that
page and write it as Heather suggests above. I usually tell people
that they can realistically shoot for 2 - 4 keyword phrases per page.
Once you've narrowed down the phrases you'll want to use the same
words in your Title Tag, Meta Description Tag, and Meta Keywords Tag.
The keywords mentioned in your question above, would be okay for your
meta keyword tag if you were using those words also within the text of
your page somewhere. What I like to do when creating meta keyword
tags is to take the particular keyword phrases that we based the copy
around, and use those first. Then I comb through the rest of the body
text and pick out other phrases that happened to be used that might be
searched upon in the engines. Once I've put all of those in, I will
then think of misspellings of any of the words that I have already
used, and add them in. Lastly, I will go through other pages of my
site and sprinkle of few of the keywords that they're targeting, into
the meta tags of this page. For the most part, I prefer to have my
meta keywords be words that are being used on that particular page.
To answer what I think was the essence of your question (now that
we've taken you on a totally new track!), yes, most engines can put
words together from a list of your meta keywords. However, if a
particular phrase combination is really important to you, be sure to
use it exactly as you want it to come up in the search engines, within
the body text, and within the Title Tag.
Hope this helps sort out the confusion a wee bit! - Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
