Focus Keyword for content [exact] or "phrase" or broad match?

When writing your content, is your focus keyword usually the [exact] match keyword with the highest amount of searches... OR is it a "phrase" match keyword or do you just do a broad match?

I just started looking into this (sadly) because I have a lot of posts that rank on the first page for some keywords, but I am getting a very few impressions from those... which I believe is due to the fact that my post titles are optimized more broad matches rather than [exact] or "phrase" match. Am I looking too much into this -- or am I looking into it just the right amount?

So basically when you rank a website for certain keywords, you always have to rank it for the highest [exact] match keyword -- and perhaps some "phrase" keywords?

you ALWAYS want to go for exact term.

you can be ranked 1 with a 500,000 broad search term and get no traffic.

It is a problem most newbies have to learn the hard way (I know I did when I first started)

LOL... guess I just learned it. So, do you just include the [exact] match keyword in the post title so it's a "phrase" match? Because I wouldn't figure having a post title that just has [making money online] as the post title, but rather "making money online with surveys"... that contains the exact match [making money online] with the ability to phrase and broad match.

directaxcess said:

LOL... guess I just learned it. So, do you just include the [exact] match keyword in the post title so it's a "phrase" match? Because I wouldn't figure having a post title that just has [making money online] as the post title, but rather "making money online with surveys"... that contains the exact match [making money online] with the ability to phrase and broad match.

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Titles can vary from person to person, some people like to do call of actions like:

Make Money Online - Earn Your First $100 in 24 Hours

I normally don't use call to actions often in titles (great in descriptions though) I normally target multiple keywords like:

Make Money Online | How To Make Money With Online Surveys

Title should be under 70 characters and your main exact keyword should be on the very left (google bot reads left to right)

You want your exact keyword to match all across the board, similar to a book. If you buy a book that is Titled "5 minute dinner recipes" and it has nothing but 30min breakfast recipes, are you going to be happy?

Keyword should be in title, description, keywords, h1, and multiple times in the content.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have anymore questions.

MeetTheVirus said:

Titles can vary from person to person, some people like to do call of actions like:

Make Money Online - Earn Your First $100 in 24 Hours

I normally don't use call to actions often in titles (great in descriptions though) I normally target multiple keywords like:

Make Money Online | How To Make Money With Online Surveys

Title should be under 70 characters and your main exact keyword should be on the very left (google bot reads left to right)

You want your exact keyword to match all across the board, similar to a book. If you buy a book that is Titled "5 minute dinner recipes" and it has nothing but 30min breakfast recipes, are you going to be happy?

Keyword should be in title, description, keywords, h1, and multiple times in the content.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have anymore questions.

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All good points here to follow; however, some clarification is needed in regards to keyword usage. At the risk of over-simplifying it, don't spam your keyword. Google takes note of the repetive keywords used on your page. Optimally you want a 3% - 5% keyword density on your page. Other than that, the tips you're receiving are golden.

Your keyword density is certainly something you need to keep track off so as to avoid looking spammy with your on page optimisation. You can try seomoz's on page term grader when looking into optimisation of your pages

Yea, but when you have something like [make money online], you can't really have one page dedicated to making money online as it breaks up into several different parts (say different methods of making money online). Now, say a post title is "make money online with surveys"... now that keyword contains [make money online] + "with surveys"... so can it still rank for [make money online] after I rank for [make money online with surveys]?

Say the whole site is focused (or one category of it) to [make money online] with derivatives (or phrases) of that keyword + other broader keywords as post/page titles... so do you just rank the MAIN site for the exact keyword and than each individual post/page for the derivative keywords? Or do you rank every single post + main page for the same [make money online] (exact) keyword?

I also don't understand, how can you even rank #1 for a broad search of a keyword :S? Broad means that any variation of that keyword... so it could be "make money online" or "make money online with surveys" or even something as stupid as "money make online"... so does that mean you rank #1 for ALL the possible variations? Is the broad search even useful at all? What are the uses of the broad search aspect of Google AdWords (perhaps to find ideas of what to write about? -- but then what if the LSI keywords have good BROAD searches but extremely low [exact] searches)?

Am I looking WAY too much into this? Should I just start ranking for [exact] + slight "phrase" keywords and Google will automatically begin to rank me for the broad keywords? Is that how it works?

I look forward to your responses so I can go ahead and finally optimize my websites!

Also @ MeetTheVirus -- if every post title (since I use WordPress) begins with Make Money Online... isn't that going to be far too much keyword usage? I mean, I use Yoast, so I could have the page title showing in search engines as something else and the actual H1 tags as something else... but than if H1 tags are meant to be optimized according to keywords too -- can't you get the keyword stuffing penalty for having that same keyword throughout your entire website :S?

Go for [exact]. Broad search terms just gives you further keyword ideas that you can use for your content without looking like spam.

Google ranks pages, not websites. You want to target different keywords across your whole site. So your homepage you want to target "Make Money Online"

On another page, lets say you have a page that talks about making money with ebay, I would then target the title of the page eBay Guides | Making Money With eBay

Even if you use wordpress you can change the title across all pages, you want to have unique titles, descriptions, etc. across all pages of your site. Target every page for another set of keywords (yes even the about us page or contact pages) I normally try to target 2-3 keywords on every page.

H1's are fine, you want it to match up to let google know what the site is relevant about, so for the ebay example:

Title: eBay Guides | Making Money With eBay
Description: Do You Know How to Make Money with eBay? Here are some basic things you never knew you could sell to make a profit on eBay.
H1: Ebay Guides - How I am Currently Making Money with eBay
Content: 3-5% Keyword Density (try to bold, underline and Italic your keyword once in the content, if possible)


Now obviously I just made this really quick and in my head without doing any keyword research or seeing what my competition is also doing. No you wont get hit for over spamming, just don't over stuff the content.

Hope that helps!