Keywords are an integral part of SEO. Good keywords provide little in the way of competition but still provide adequate levels of traffic. They are also targeted to ensure that the resulting traffic is responsive and open to the message that you are portraying on your web pages. Poorly targeted keywords or overly generic ones can make it virtually impossible to rank highly and generate reasonable traffic.

1 - Regular Research

Keyword research should ideally be conducted on a regular basis. Popular keywords change on a regular basis and what may be popular today could be gone tomorrow. Similarly, you may find that entirely different keywords are those that you should be targeting in a month or two. By conducting new keyword research regularly, you will be able to find the most beneficial keywords.

2 – Use Semantically Related Keywords

Not every page needs to concentrate on a single keyword, especially not since search engines have introduced LSI. By combining several semantically related keywords into one page it is possible to reduce the number of pages on your site and offer more detailed content. Don’t get too carried away though. You will never manage to effectively optimise a page for too large a number of keywords.

3 – Use Targeted Keywords Rather Than Generic Ones

Generic keywords are more difficult to rank highly for than the more specific ones. They also generate less active traffic. Generally speaking, single word keywords are very difficult to rank highly for and most people when searching for a specific product or service (when they are more likely to want to part with their money) will use two or more words.

Rewriting your websites URLs is an important and proven method for successful SEO. There are four core reasons for this, they maybe staring you in the face but to some they maybe not so obvious, please read on to see how a re write can benefit your site.

1. Duplicate content
2. Google reads keywords in the URL
3. Combine strength of multiple sites
4. Links go to 2 different places

Duplicate Content – Having 2 URLs that point to a single page can be seen as duplicate content even if they are situated on the same domain. The most common error is when you have the URL www.seoconsult.co.uk/index.html and the standard www.seoconsult.co.uk both displaying exactly the same site.

Keywords in the URL – Having your keywords in your URL, even if they are a sub domain is extremely advantageous from a search results perspective. This is the first place a crawler will look and the likelihood is you will gain results faster this way than any other form of search engine optimisation,

Combine strength – If you have used more than one site on more than one domain, or you have a .com and a .co.uk site that are exactly the same, the best thing you can do is to combine the strength of all the sites. Through a 301 redirect Google will see that the sites have all been permanently moved to go to one site, merging all the PageRank and authority that the others have gathered, thus creating one powerful domain.

External linking – When outside sources are organically linking to your site, there is a chance that some could link to www.seoconsult.co.uk/index.html, this leakage could be detrimental to your long-term authority and PageRank.

The best way to solve all of the above issues is via a htaccess file if you’re on an apache/linux server, or through the control panel on a Microsoft server. Both these methods can put permanent forwards from one page to another and here at SEO Consult we ensure that every client takes full benefit for this service.