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Tonight I was playing around with the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, and now I have a few questions.
In this industry, how important is it to target unique or “less common” keyword phrases?
If you type “online poker” into the Overture keyword search box, it shows that this phrase was searched for 117,980 times in October. Now, would it be a bad idea to target those keywords on your website, because of the thousands of other sites targeting the same keywords? Or would it be a good idea because there’s a bigger piece of pie to be had, so to speak? The thinking behind the latter idea is that with more people searching for those keywords, you’re bound to get some hits regardless of where your site appears in the search results.
I guess what I’m trying to find out is whether it’s better to have a higher ranking on a phrase that fewer people search for, or whether it’s better to have a lower ranking on a phrase that many, many people search for.
Thoughts?
I’ve found that, no matter how popular the key phrase is, if you aren’t in the top 10 the traffic you get isn’t worth the bother.
Although it is a bit more work, targeting lesser used phrases will give you a much better chance at hitting the top 10. For a new site, it is beneficial to target the lesser known phrases, and to target 3 word phrases or longer.
You can always include in that phrase popular key phrases to focus on as your website gains links and rank.
I have several popular phrases in the top 10, yet still the vast majority of hits I get are from phrases I haven’t even targeted specifically – thousands a month from those. Some of the darndest phrases….
That’s my two cents worth, anyway.
The popular key phrases have both the highest competition and the highest click fraud.
I have not fared well with these – ever. As friendly and helpful as we all are to each other here, your listing will be clicked to death by competitiors, if not by professional clickers and automated clicking.
I recommend less common phrases.
Ahh, I was assuming the question was about SEO, rather than PPC.
Either way, less targeted has 2 out of 2 votes.
Well, I wonder now. It talks about Overture, but is in the SEO forum.
Guess we’ll wait for clarification. :bigsmile:
Thanks for your responses. Very interesting.
To clarify — my original question was about how to select keywords. I think a question like that would go in the SEO forum, because my ultimate goal is to choose keywords that will help me with the search engines. I only mentioned the Overture keyword tool to help illustrate what I was talking about. Sorry if I was confusing. :satisfied
So it sounds like picking popular phrases is a bad idea. Dominique’s info about PPC fraud is something I hadn’t even thought about. Thanks for that tip — that will be very important when I start doing paid advertising.
Okay, now let’s say I pick a less-common 3 or 4 word phrase to target, and I have the phrase on my page in several different areas.
1) Should the
2) When I do link exchanges, should the anchor text match the key phrase?Thanks again.
Try to target phrases that contain the more popular phrases within. So if your targeting Online Casino, target something like Best Online Casino, or Online Casino Reviews (just examples). That way you’ll still be targetting your less-competitive phrase and getting high rankings for that, but you’ll also be competing for the popular phrases too.
Thanks for the help guys. :cheers:
