Noob Onpage Seo Question

[fullwall3t]

For the longest time i was using All in seo in all of my wordpress sites, but for my new site i choose to try YOAST Seo plugin ( i beleive i read some tutorial here and istalled all the plugins he suggested) But there are no meta keywords, only "Focus keyword" so i googled it and found option how to have option to add meta keywords, do you use Focus keyword or meta keywords?

And second question is, lets say my domain name is yellowtruck.com and i want to rank my article for long tail kw "yellow truck engine power", should i make the url yellowtruck.com/engine-power or yellowtruck.com/yellow-truck-engine-power/

Thanks for answers in advance.

 

[fullwall3t]

Can anyone help me with this? I don't know if i can trust Matt Cutts with advice of not using meta keywords... what is your take on this?

 

[RedMango]

I use them, most people don't. I use Yoast. You simply enable the option to have meta tags, and fill in about 4-5 variations (long tails) of your main kw, mix it up a bit. More importantly, these days, are alt tags (image tags) and image descriptions, you would be amazed at the traffic you can gain from this as not many other people tend to optimise their images that much.

Focus keyword is your main keyword of the page. Meta keywords are ones that are secondary to the focus keyword that you would like to have an impact from the content that is mainly optimised for the primary keyword. HTH

 

[fullwall3t]

I use them, most people don't. I use Yoast. You simply enable the option to have meta tags, and fill in about 4-5 variations (long tails) of your main kw, mix it up a bit. More importantly, these days, are alt tags (image tags) and image descriptions, you would be amazed at the traffic you can gain from this as not many other people tend to optimise their images that much.

Focus keyword is your main keyword of the page. Meta keywords are ones that are secondary to the focus keyword that you would like to have an impact from the content that is mainly optimised for the primary keyword. HTH

Thanks so much for reply. Should be alt text different than title of the image? Does alt text count towards to keyword density? (Right know i have around 1% in 2k articles, so if alt text counts and i up it to 1,5% to 2% ? i should be still ok, right? )
How long description do you use for images? I never done that, i added a lot of pictures to articles with main kw, but i never did description? And What about caption?
Do you include the keyword which you input in focused keyword also in meta keywords? Because from what i understand if you input focused keyword it won't ad it into meta kws automaticly, so should i added to my long tails?

Can anyone help me with that url thing?

 

[kleinart]

Both permalink options are fine as you would have all keywords in your url. The second option is better though and it is always advisable to get a brandable domain instead of an emd.

 

[fullwall3t]

Both permalink options are fine as you would have all keywords in your url. The second option is better though and it is always advisable to get a brandable domain instead of an emd.

So i should use the second scenerio even when i have emd? even that the main kw would be there "twice" ? I have high volume kw wtih med competition, i choose emd, because i had better succes with it in the past, than with brandable domains.

 

[RedMango]

Thanks so much for reply. Should be alt text different than title of the image? Does alt text count towards to keyword density? (Right know i have around 1% in 2k articles, so if alt text counts and i up it to 1,5% to 2% ? i should be still ok, right? )
How long description do you use for images? I never done that, i added a lot of pictures to articles with main kw, but i never did description? And What about caption?
Do you include the keyword which you input in focused keyword also in meta keywords? Because from what i understand if you input focused keyword it won't ad it into meta kws automaticly, so should i added to my long tails?

Can anyone help me with that url thing?

If you have an EMD and you're doing OK then stick with it. I have many and they work fine.

Let's make an example so I can explain what I mean:

Main kw personal loan
secondary kws bad credit personal loan, low apr personal loan, best personal loan rates

I'd have a bunch of LSI keywords on the main article focusing around "personal loan". Alt tags would be the seconardaries if I had enough images. Alt Descriptions, treat them like a meta description ( a unique one to the real meta though) - Captions, take it literally and use a caption for the image - so "looking for a personal loan, then you've come to the right place" or something.

No it won't add automatically to the metas, you have to do that manually, unless there is a trick/plugin that grabs and adds but I like to have control.

It's best to have a silo'd URL structure - so personal-loans.com/bad-credit/explained - don't worry that there are the keywords placed twice. Google isn't that strict (yet), and there is some leniency, so don't worry about it. If you hit a brickwall then maybe throttle it back a bit.

 

[fullwall3t]

If you have an EMD and you're doing OK then stick with it. I have many and they work fine.

Let's make an example so I can explain what I mean:

Main kw personal loan
secondary kws bad credit personal loan, low apr personal loan, best personal loan rates

I'd have a bunch of LSI keywords on the main article focusing around "personal loan". Alt tags would be the seconardaries if I had enough images. Alt Descriptions, treat them like a meta description ( a unique one to the real meta though) - Captions, take it literally and use a caption for the image - so "looking for a personal loan, then you've come to the right place" or something.

No it won't add automatically to the metas, you have to do that manually, unless there is a trick/plugin that grabs and adds but I like to have control.

It's best to have a silo'd URL structure - so personal-loans.com/bad-credit/explained - don't worry that there are the keywords placed twice. Google isn't that strict (yet), and there is some leniency, so don't worry about it. If you hit a brickwall then maybe throttle it back a bit.

Thanks so much, i will try this on two new microniche sites, time to make some $$

Thank xou again, this might be gamechanger for me. I'm starting to know wtf i'm doing!

 

[amazzy]

Not sure if this was stated succinctly but, the "focus keyword" is an admin tool in YOAST to evaluate your post for its effectiveness against the posts "intended focus". Meta keywords is a meta tag visible to search engines for their own use (focus keyword is only visible to you). Also apparently, yoast does not recommend even using meta keywords... Though I believe it's still an option.

 

[fullwall3t]

Not sure if this was stated succinctly but, the "focus keyword" is an admin tool in YOAST to evaluate your post for its effectiveness against the posts "intended focus". Meta keywords is a meta tag visible to search engines for their own use (focus keyword is only visible to you). Also apparently, yoast does not recommend even using meta keywords... Though I believe it's still an option.

But most bhw members probably use them, or not?

 

[michaelr1988]

But most bhw members probably use them, or not?

I can't speak for other members, but I never use meta keyword tag. Ever. It's not needed to rank and often pushes keyword density higher than I would like. Just focus on keeping main keyword around 1% then anything else use long tail variation.

 

[kickthat]

I never use meta keywords. Did a small scale test on a few domains to see if including them made a difference - mainly as I noticed quite a few sites that were ranking well in Bing were using them. I wasn't able to see any great difference with using them, but probably should be tested more...

 

[0077black]

For second question you can go with your 1st option . Just make sure all your keywords get into the url including domain name

 

[fullwall3t]

Thanks everyone for their input, i published all of the articles today, let's see what rankings it will get me (=