How do you target 9 keywords on one page?

I'm working on a corporate media site which provides 9 different services, all loosely related.

The site features a page for each of these 9 services, as well as a Services page, Contact page, About page, and home page.

My instinct is to target the main keyword from each service on our home page, and then variations on our services page, and them more variations on each category page... however, how does one target so many one one page?

My main competitor who's sitting at #1 in gxxgle for nearly all the industries keywords has his all of these keywords and lots more crammed into the title, description, and then TONS of copy on his homepage.

Everything i've seen said you shouldn't have more than 3 keywords in your title and description... but if that's the case how would one ever target more than 3 words on any given page???

So how would I pull this off? Surely my competitor is wrong...

Thanks,

Chocko

chockomonkey said:

So how would I pull this off? Surely my competitor is wrong...


Chocko

Click to expand...

Like you, I dont know how on earth you would target 9 kw's in such a way! However, given what you have said I'd say your competitor is right NOT wrong!

At the end of the day, every article you read on BHW (or elsewhere) about google and how they rank, is puerly an opinion and not a fact. Im researching for a niche at the moment, and the #1 site;

Has a front page with less than 100 words on it.
Has hammered their alt tags with their keywords
Has hardly any backlinks
Has a keyword density (visible) of over 30%

Most of the above people will tell you is wrong, yet they rank #1.....so go figure.

Targeting 9 keywords on one page is Keyword canabilization, you target 3 keywords max.

Nowdays I probably wouldn't even go for more than two on one page to be honest.

What I would do is try to get the mainpage ranked for a term that could be used to describe all the services you provide.

Then I would have individual pages targeting the money keywords. Build backlinks to all the pages and get them all ranked for their own terms.

good rule of thumb to follow is to optimize one keyword phrase per page.

I agree wtih most of the tips already given... there is a saying, "when you're optimized for everything, you're optimized for nothing".

I think thats the risk you run by trying to do too much with one page.

Do not target 9 keywords to the same page simply because one day in the future, you will have greater chance to losing them all, in contrast to where you target different pages (or subdomains), and your keywords will always have value.

Not to mention this is almost impossible.

There are too many unknown factors here... Are most if not all of these keywords long tail ones? If so it's very feasible they could rank for all of them on just one page. Does your competitor have sub pages for all these keywords too besides just having them all on the home page, and does the search in giggle for any given keyword return the home page and then the sub page underneath it? Did you consider that he might have DOZENS of other pages/sites 301'd to that home page with each having links targetting each keyword? What's the competition like for these keywords?

And I could go on and on and on....

There are very few ABSOLUTES in Seo and in dealing with giggle. You are not the first and will surely not be the last to find a competitor sitting at #1 that makes no sense whatsoever from the naked eye. I can also tell you that while many people mean well and in most cases their advice has been proven to be good, there are quite a few people who've become WILDLY successful doing one simple thing....

THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT EVERYONE ELSE SAID TO DO.

Good luck to you.

You don't... tuning for everything is the same thing as tuning for nothing...

Think about it in terms of keyword %. Tuning for too many in the 1%+ range steals relevance from the other 1%+ words... You are far better off making nine pages and inter-linking them.

I think it comes down to the URL being promoted for a keyword. I faced a similar dilemma a few months back with my client's corporate website- 6 different services to promote.
What I did however is to see which page is more suitable to be optimized for a particular keyword. If an inner page has more keyword density, navigation structure and related on-page factors etc. for a keyword, then naturally that page would be optimized with backlinks.

However, if my home page is ranking for a keyword higher than the inner page, than I would keep optimizing the home page for that keyword.

So check both your target url or page's seo suitability as well as existing ranking before finalizing which url to optimize for which keywords.

Thanks to all who've replied, you've backed up my instincts, and I will now find a way to keep it down under 3. This is i suppose where i'll have to get creative, because the company who's website i'm working on is in a really niche market and provides a lot of different things. 9 different services in all, and only like 3 of them does giggle consider to be in the same "neighborhood."

As such, I can't think of any keywords which would encompass everything the company does... (other than one word ones, which imo would be pointless... right? i.e. "music" would not be a good keyword to even attempt). So, i reckon i'll simply have to pick the most important 3 services we provide and try to get double-listings on those via my main page and the category page i'll make for them. Our other services can be mentioned on the services page and their category page, not on the homepage. But this also means that i won't use the services page for the 3 on the home page, even though they'll be listed there.

What about having a paragraph on the homepage with a link to the category page for one of these services i choose not to tune for on the homepage? Would that be beneficial/detrimental if the keyword did not appear in the title or description, etc? Or should all the effort go into the 2-3 keywords i really want to rank for?

conrulez said:

There are too many unknown factors here... Are most if not all of these keywords long tail ones? If so it's very feasible they could rank for all of them on just one page. Does your competitor have sub pages for all these keywords too besides just having them all on the home page, and does the search in giggle for any given keyword return the home page and then the sub page underneath it? Did you consider that he might have DOZENS of other pages/sites 301'd to that home page with each having links targetting each keyword? What's the competition like for these keywords.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply, i appreciate it keeping me thinking of other possibilities. The competition is really low in this niche. I'd say this main competitor is the only one who's really running any SEO campaign. None of these keywords are longtail. They're all the most basic way to describe the given service. This competitor has tons of subpages... like 200 or so indexed pages... every page of his site has most if not all of the available keywords in his title, description, meta... but the key ones in the url and tuned for on the page. So it looks like he's basically making his titles pretty useless... He doesn't have any double listings though. His listing in giggle is like this:

Keyword by Company Name; keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword...
Keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword,
keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, ...
www.hishomepage.com/ Cached - Similar

I always forget the possibility of him using lots of 301's... how annoying that is. I really should start employing that myself.... seems way overpowered

beazt said:

I think it comes down to the URL being promoted for a keyword. I faced a similar dilemma a few months back with my client's corporate website- 6 different services to promote.
What I did however is to see which page is more suitable to be optimized for a particular keyword. If an inner page has more keyword density, navigation structure and related on-page factors etc. for a keyword, then naturally that page would be optimized with backlinks.

However, if my home page is ranking for a keyword higher than the inner page, than I would keep optimizing the home page for that keyword.

So check both your target url or page's seo suitability as well as existing ranking before finalizing which url to optimize for which keywords.

Click to expand...

Appreciate the insight, i'll keep that in mind! As it is currently though, there's no SEO optimization on any of these pages, and very few backlinks... we only have one ranking in the serps which doesn't even get any traffic... so i'm kinda starting from ground zero.