Selecting keywords for homepage
-
Hello Forum ,
I am working with an online yoga equipment retailer and am trying to select keywords for their homepage <title>. Initially, I focused on 2 keywords: One is a high-level (i.e. not product-specific) keyword, "yoga equipment", that receives 5,400 monthly Google phrase searches per month. The other keyword is a more-specific keyword, "yoga mats", with 60,000 monthly Google searches. </span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">However, I'm noticing that Google is sending users who use other more-specific keywords to our homepage. For example, our search result for "yoga bolster" (1,900 monthly Google phrase searches) takes visitors to the homepage, not our page dedicated to yoga bolsters (this page is already optimized for the keywords "bolsters, yoga bolsters, etc") We have an optimized yoga mat page in our shop, but Google still sends visitors to the homepage instead.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">1. Should I add a keywords like "bolster" to the homepage title? Example: "Yoga Mats, Bolsters, Products, and Accessories." Or should I stick to high-level keywords? </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">2. Would it be a good idea to add the word "yoga" to each term: "Yoga Mats, Yoga Bolsters, Yoga Gear and Yoga Accessories"</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">I appreciate the insight and thanks for your time.</p></title>
-
On top of what everyone else has touched on, dont forget to look at the competition and see what they are doing. You should be able to pick up some ideas there.
-
Much appreciated. We will ensure that no keyword appears in more than one title. Thanks for the guidance on this scenario.
-
Thanks for your response.
We agree on strategy. Rather than dilute other page's future value by optimizing the homepage as a keyword catchall, we should focus on link-building to our category pages.
We will also not stuff our title section. We'll use something like "Yoga Gear and Accessories."
-
Google is going to choose the most relevant page for the search query. I would keep your pages as tightly themed as possible.You don't want them competing with each other. You don't want the same keywords in your title tags for two different pages. I believe the coined term is keyword cannibalization.
It's good that you have landing pages and the fact that you are not seeing them in the SERPS means that your new site is not fully indexed. A week isn't a lot of time. It can take several weeks for things to settle and your pages find their places.
I don't know what platform your site is on but it may speed the indexing process along if you use Google webmaster tools to submit a sitemap.
-
Thanks for the response. I should also mention we revamped our site about a week ago. Prior to this, its SEO was not considered.. In redoing the website, we implemented your suggested steps above. Now we have a top-down site layout that goes from broad categories to specific products. The optimization of each page matches this structure.
My hunch is that we're also still waiting for Google to completely re-index the new site, including our newly-optimized category pages. These pages also have few external links, but many internal links thanks the our new linking structure.
We will keep the title short and focus on the keywords that drive traffic to our site. Any other thoughts/suggestions are welcome, especially about get tin re-indexed.
-
I should also mention that we just redid the site. The previous website didn't have any SEO and it seems like Google indexed the homepage for nearly all keywords. Now that we've redone the site-- about a week ago--Google still takes people the homepage even though we have optimized specific pages for specific keywords.
So far, I have not seen indexed versions of our product category pages appear in the search results, so no flags have gone up for page competition. in fact, Google still has some of the old website URLs indexed (Don't worry, we're using 301 redirects).
What do you think? Does Google just need some more time to re-index our site and remap its keyword associations?
(I too was hesitant to put keywords in more than one location, but after seeing people were being channeled to our homepage, I thought it might make sense to add a few keywords there to keep its ranking up)
-
You need to avoid internal competition while selecting keywords for the internal pages.
It is unavoidable using the same word for the home page to give overall idea about the site to users and search engines.
I would suggest a couple of steps to rank your preferred page for a specific keyword:
-
checking anchor texts of internal and external links. "Yoga mat" page to get link for the anchor text "yoga mat".
-
usage of keyword in the URL and position of keyword in the title
-
checking usage of keywords in the headline, image alt tag and image title
Answers to your questions:
1. Identify the top traffic driving keywords to your site. You may use them in the home page title but don't acquire links for the home page using these keywords which may develop internal competition with your home page and internal pages.
2. Title length is very limited. So use the space appropriately.
-
-
To your second question: . Would it be a good idea to add the word "yoga" to each term: "Yoga Mats, Yoga Bolsters, Yoga Gear and Yoga Accessories"
I just asked a similar question on whether a city name should be repeated in the title tag. You might want to review the responses: http://www.seomoz.org/q/effect-of-repeating-keyword-in-title-effective-or-diluting/.
FWIW.
My two cents on #1: I would rather work on optimizing your bolster page as a landing page by building internal and external links to that page than optimize the home page for bolster.
-
I would be curious to know if your website home page has some inbound links point to it using anchor text with those search terms...."yoga bolsters" or "yoga mats."
There is also the possibility that your pages have similar content and Google is dropping the the other pages. Are the "yoga bolster" and "yoga mat" page indexed and ranking well? Are they competing with your home page in the results?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will Google Judge Duplicate Content on Responsive Pages to be Keyword Spamming?
I have a website for my small business, and hope to improve the search results position for 5 landing pages. I recently modified my website to make it responsive (mobile friendly). I was not able to use Bootstrap; the layout of the pages is a bit unusual and doesn't lend itself to the options Bootstrap provides. Each landing page has 3 main div's - one for desktop, one for tablet, one for phone.
Web Design | | CurtisB
The text content displayed in each div is the same. Only one of the 3 div’s is visible; the user’s screen width determines which div is visible. When I wrote the HTML for the page, I didn't want each div to have identical text. I worried that
when Google indexed the page it would see the same text 3 times, and would conclude that keyword spamming was occurring. So I put the text in just one div. And when the page loads jQuery copies the text from the first div to the other two div's. But now I've learned that when Google indexes a page it looks at both the page that is served AND the page that is rendered. And in my case the page that is rendered - after it loads and the jQuery code is executed – contains duplicate text content in three div's. So perhaps my approach - having the served page contain just one div with text content – fails to help, because Google examines the rendered page, which has duplicate text content in three div's. Here is the layout of one landing page, as served by the server. 1000 words of text goes here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. ===================================================================================== My question is: Will Google conclude that keyword spamming is occurring because of the duplicate content the rendered page contains, or will it realize that only one of the div's is visible at a time, and the duplicate content is there only to achieve a responsive design? Thank you!0 -
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
Could a redirecting a homepage mess with seo? if so is there any documentation you could point me too? Thanks!
I have a global page for our site but the global site has the exact same content as the main navigation personal page. If I redirect /index to /personal how much seo damage are we doing?
Web Design | | Miguelquirarte0 -
Are there any hard rules about internal linking of homepage?
Hi all, Usually we link homepage from all pages. That's definitely a boost for homepage to rank well. Do we need to interlink homepage to the highest? Including links from subdomains or sub directories. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
How many keywords is too many?
Since it seems it takes so long for Google to revisit a changed page, we sort of loose track of changes made trying to optimize a specific URL for a keyword. Any sense of how many times is the optimum number of times to use a single keyword on a single page? I'm referring to the total including Title, Description, Content, Alt=. The whole shooting match. I have seen our Google results improve after we have removed several iterations of a keyword Thank You
Web Design | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Should the primary navigation use keyword rich menu items?
There doesn't seem to be a definitive (or even authoritative) answer to this. The quandry is primary top navigation - the client wants to use 2-3 keyword length nav items, and I'm politely forcing him to use single word nav. The problem is that I have nothing to back up that assertion other than "this way looks better". Examples - Site is www.buybluewidgets.com. The client wants: About Our Blue Widgets Buy a Blue Widget Azure Widget Information Sell Your Blue Thingamajig My suggestion is: About Us Buy Learn Sell
Web Design | | AMSVansSEOTeam0 -
Non-performing keyword
We recently completely started over with our website. I didn't mind not ranking for these keywords for a while because through extensive TV commercials our branded keywords perform the best for us anyway. However, a month and a half later, all but one keyword is ranking in the top 3 pages on Google. We are using Joomla! CMS and I first suspected that it may be a problem, but all of my crawl results are good. I think Joomla sites look good and are really easy for clients to edit on their own. I would really like to keep offering Joomla sites, but if this is the cause, I may need to reconsider. I have a few links to the page and I do know that I need more, but I have pages and keywords with fewer backlinks and harder keywords that are ranking. I have been busy with clients and unable to spend a lot of time on MY site ( My grandma always told me, " The Shoemaker's kids go barefoot"). I'm wondering if anyone can take a peek and help me over this hump? It's probably something stupid, and the rest of my sites are performing on the 1st page for their keywords, so I must be doing something right 😉 . I'm just not sure what I'm not seeing. The page in question is http://wootencomputer.com/internet-marketing/web-design and keyword I'm going for is: web design greenville sc Thank you all so much in advance. Also, I should add that with our past sites, we've ranked very well with this keyword.
Web Design | | NatalieWooten0 -
For a varied product type or keywords group is it best to have several sites?
Hello everyone... Question: I have 7-8 generic keywords that I would like to rank for, is it possible for one site to rank highly for all these different keywords, or would this be best achieved by making 2 or 3 websites in total targeting different keywords (product sectors)? More info: We are in a niche industry & would like to know if it would be beneficial to have several websites made for specific product types rather than one main site? Although these sub classifications of products are nice, they are competitive as they have a high search volume Would it be better to build specific websites that only do that one type of product and have related keyword in domain, content & blogs on the site to that effect to increase relevance and positions as a result? Thanks
Web Design | | Ray_UK0
