PHPBUILT's Idiot-Proof Guide to Authority Site Building

phpbuilt said:

You want to balance the page. Keyword density is a method for balancing the page. Sometimes I want to use the keyword more in body, but I feel the keyword in title + h1 tag from template restating the title is overpowering ... so I will break up the keyword in the title. If my desired keyword is "green outdoor widget" I would switch the title to "Best green widget for the outdoors". Chopping up your desired keyword like that is a huge underoptimization, and would allow you to exactly use "green outdoor widget" an extra couple times in content without being penalized.

Personally, for me keyword density is usually about reducing it, because I am predisposed to overdoing it. On the other hand, I've helped a few people here by auditing their sites and I've seen some with underoptimization issues -- where they actually need to use the keyword more.

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Could you take a quick look at one of my pages when you have time and let me know if I'm under-optimized? I've been tweaking (lowering the density) this page/site since I started following your thread but I can't seem to get it to rank in top 100 (uncompetitive term). It's a brand new website with no backlinks built to it yet.

How do you go about writing a blog post targeting a product review?

Let's say your keyword is: Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review

It seems like it would be hard to get creative without over optimizing. In a 500 word article, you mention the keyword once and you are already at 1% density. Also, what would you put in the title?

Is the strategy to produce longer articles for product reviews?

Talleyrand said:

How do you go about writing a blog post targeting a product review?

Let's say your keyword is: Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review

It seems like it would be hard to get creative without over optimizing. In a 500 word article, you mention the keyword once and you are already at 1% density. Also, what would you put in the title?

Is the strategy to produce longer articles for product reviews?

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Hello mate and welcome to the forum!

If you have bothered checking the previous pages you would have had an answer to your question.
Every page is golden if you wish to learn more about Internet Marketing so stop wasting other people`s time because you are lazy. This is no Free SEO Consultation service.

Happy New Year !

Great Thread PHPBUILT!
Question concerning Keyword Density on a post... are you saying your trying to rank a certain keyword for each post and it also should be related to the main page keyword? Also, say i'm trying to rank my main page for a high volume searched google keyword like "rainbow loom bracelets" which is a "three word phrase" keyword. Will I be hurt in site ranking if I have this keyword scattered through out the website with a density of more than 2%? Also if I have "one word" and "two word" phrases like "rainbow loom" and say "bracelet" at each of around 10% density through out the web site is that going to hurt the ranking for the main keyword "rainbow loom bracelets"?

Thanks again for helping us all out.
Savageman

Bragah said:

Hello mate and welcome to the forum!

If you have bothered checking the previous pages you would have had an answer to your question.
Every page is golden if you wish to learn more about Internet Marketing so stop wasting other people`s time because you are lazy. This is no Free SEO Consultation service.

Happy New Year !

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Stop being passive-aggressive.

I read every single page and have replied throughout the thread. If phpbuilt wants to ignore my question then he is welcome to do so.

Talleyrand said:

Stop being passive-aggressive.

I read every single page and have replied throughout the thread. If phpbuilt wants to ignore my question then he is welcome to do so.

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Yea I`m sorry I shouldn`t have reacted that way...

It`s just that I feel like this is a great post, especially for what has been posted on BHW lately, and if I do a check on last 5 pages, all I see are new members that make 10 quick posts and come here just to have their questions answered.

But you are right : " If phpbuilt wants to ignore your question then he is welcome to do so."

^^ I understand what you were trying to say. No hard feelings.

savageman said:

Great Thread PHPBUILT!
Question concerning Keyword Density on a post... are you saying your trying to rank a certain keyword for each post and it also should be related to the main page keyword?

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If you go into webmaster tools, under Google Index > Content Keywords, you'll see that Google keeps an interesting statistic about your site. They give you a breakdown of all the keywords your site uses. They keep this data for every site they index. The question is, "why?" Why do they break down every single word on your entire website? The answer is relevancy.

Line 100 newbie SEOs up in a row and ask them a simple question ... "If you own a pet website, would you rather get 100 backlinks from pet related sites, or from any random type of site?" Certainly they'd all say "pet", there's really no argument there -- its obvious you need links from related sites.

When you look at the Google webmaster tools, you see what words your site is relevant for. Whatever the top-10 keywords are, your site can link to another site using those keywords and your link is extremely relevant, so its a huge boost to whoever you've linked to.

On the flip side ... if your entire site only used that keyword once -- when it links to another site using that keyword, it is not very relevant at all.

Did you know it also works this way when you link within your own site? If you create a new article, and that article happens to cover the same topic as defined within your top keywords for the site -- Google then considers your site relevant for that keyword set, so you're likely to rank better on that keyword. This issue of "relevancy" is certainly one of the 200+ factors that Google considers when ranking your page.

So to answer your question about "rank a certain keyword for each post and it also should be related to the main page keyword", I'd say it has to be related to the main theme of your website, as defined by this relevancy section of Google's webmaster tools. If you write about anything in that section -- you get a bonus on it. If you write an article about guitars on a pet store site ... it may still rank from other factors, but it isn't getting a single bit of help from relevancy.

Answering your final question, your entire website's density shouldn't ever be 10% on a word because no single article should ever exceed 2% on a word. That means sitewide you would never exceed 2% on a word.

Incidentally, this is why I say you reuse 1 set of web2.0s per niche. If you have a web2.0 that is relevant for pets -- it gives a relevancy bonus to any site it links to that wants to rank for pet related keywords.

Talleyrand said:

How do you go about writing a blog post targeting a product review? Let's say your keyword is: Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review It seems like it would be hard to get creative without over optimizing. In a 500 word article, you mention the keyword once and you are already at 1% density. Also, what would you put in the title? Is the strategy to produce longer articles for product reviews?

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I may misunderstand you, but 1 percent of 500 is 5. So if you use your keyword 5 times within your 500 word review, it is only 1 percent.

dukeking said:

I may misunderstand you, but 1 percent of 500 is 5. So if you use your keyword 5 times within your 500 word review, it is only 1 percent.

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It's a five word keyword, so therefore the density would be 1% if you only used it once.

Talleyrand said:

How do you go about writing a blog post targeting a product review?

Let's say your keyword is: Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review

It seems like it would be hard to get creative without over optimizing. In a 500 word article, you mention the keyword once and you are already at 1% density. Also, what would you put in the title?

Is the strategy to produce longer articles for product reviews?

Click to expand...

First of all, products are my favorite type of site to make -- so this is one of my specialties and I've got some advice you didn't ask for but I'm going to say it anyways.

I do not like SEOing for specific product names. It's pretty much a huge fail. I just googled the term and these are the top 10 results:

reviews.cnet.co.uk
pcmag.com
amazon.com
reviews.cnet.co.uk
nydailynews.com
store.sony.com
store.sony.com

Then 8, 9 and 10 are youtube and 2 more relatively difficult sites.

Not even sony itself, with "review" in its title can rank above #6 on their own product.

So whats the problem here? The problem is that nobody wanting to sell products is very creative. Everyone tries to rank for the product name *yawn*. There's no way you'll ever be as moderately successful as if you took another approach.

I'm going to tell you how to do this -- but for the most part, step 1 is to never try to rank for a specific product name again. Why?

- everyone else does that, too competitive
- if someone is looking for a specific product, that means they are going to buy it. that means if you are not #1, #2 or #3 -- you're SOL, because by the time they're considering scrolling the page down they've already bought it.
- usually, Google starts to have an orgasm when someone types a product name and they show pictures of that product for them to buy plastered all over the place, to the extent you see no organic SERP listings above the fold

Ok, did I make my point? SEOing for product names is retarded, end of story. So then, what do you do? Glad you asked. Hold on, let me stroll over to the Google keyword planer ... hmm hmm hmm. Ok. *types in ... mp3 player* Hmm hmm hmm. Ok.

16gb mp3 player - 720 exact. Cool. Checking serps. Those SERPs, to me, look like a sandbox compared to the SERPs on the specific product name. Lets see some more ...

16gb mp3 player - 720 exact
mp3 players for sale - 2400 exact
mp3 players for kids - 880 exact
mp3 player for kids - 1900 exact
kids mp3 player - 1000 exact
bluetooth mp3 player - 1900 exact
mp3 player with bluetooth - 880 exact

The top results on these terms are not trying to rank for these keywords. They're ranking by accident. They're trying to SEO for a specific product name and it just so happened to have bluetooth in it so they ranked. You, on the other hand, can spank their butts because you can write an article that is relvant to bluetooth, as opposed to accidentally ranking for it by using the word and then relying on your sites mega-authority for the rest (like amazon, best buy, ebay). They didn't set out to rank for bluetooth, so you can take that keyword. On the other hand, they did set out to rank for that specific product name.

So to answer your question, I don't usually try to rank for "product reviews" type keywords. I'd make an article "top 10 mp3 players for kids" and show them 10 really cool mp3 players that are colorful or had Ben 10 on it or something.

This is an approach i didn't try. However as far as I can see competition is pretty much the same as for the Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review. The difference is that bestbuy and ebay are higher? Maybe you use ebay as an indicator that ensures that the keyword is easy to rank? If so what are other indicators that keyword is an easy to rank keyword?

Hi PhpBuilt

What you are saying is ringing true - based on what I am looking at on page 1 of Google for a lot of keywords. So I'm throwing in a before and after study for you

Before:

Keyphrase: 3 words
1000 MS (broad match)
Density: 3.5%
2/3 word density: 6% (didn't realize that)
Rankings



So I've just done some tweaking...

Now we're looking at

Density: 1.3%
2/3 Word Density: 1.9% - struggling to get this down without using "it" in place of my every keyword in every paragraph. Should this be fine PHPBuilt? Anyway here's my test

XH

moonlighsunligh said:

This is an approach i didn't try. However as far as I can see competition is pretty much the same as for the Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review. The difference is that bestbuy and ebay are higher? Maybe you use ebay as an indicator that ensures that the keyword is easy to rank? If so what are other indicators that keyword is an easy to rank keyword?

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Its not the same, when it comes to the specific product names -- they set out to rank for that and are very-much entrenched.

However, they did not set out to rank for "mp3 player with bluetooth", for the most part. Best buy did, so they're #1. Ebay did, so they're #2.

Amazon did not, their use of bluetooth is a modifier to a product name. As defined in previous posts, because they did not segregate their main term (in this instance, "bluetooth"), from other terms (in this case "Creative ZEN X-Fi3 16GB") -- their use of bluetooth is a far weaker position -- at first glance from the title.

Then Sony is optimized at #4, but #5 (creative labs) is not.

Then at #6, you have reviews.cnet.com ... and they don't even use Bluetooth in the title.

This tells me #6 is a breeze, #5 is a walk in the park, #4 is slightly more difficult, but because Amazon isn't optimized you could take #3 with a medium effort. #1 and #2 may or may not be more effort than its worth.

Compare that again to "Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review", were you're dealing with that term, in title, all the way through page 10 of the SERPs.

The difference is this, and its a huge difference: you specifically set out to write about mp3 players with bluetooth. Hardly anyone else is doing that ... so the competition is very limited. Everyone else is going for the exact product name + review ... its a far more difficult path to take.

phpbuilt said:

First of all, products are my favorite type of site to make -- so this is one of my specialties and I've got some advice you didn't ask for but I'm going to say it anyways.

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That post was genius, pure genius.

I can see why your new site has taken off without backlinks. Keep us updated on it.

Cool. I didn't take much in account exact match in title in competition research, thought I do use it for example if there are less that 5 title matches on serps in top 10 I add 2 points to that keyword. Much better factors imo are DA and domain age, both minimal values and average value. All these domains have a very high DA and probably all of them are more than 10 years old. Then how do you know you would be able to rank for the term no other young sites did?

I did managed to outrank 10+ years old sites back in 2010 with nothing but a 1000 pages site that reviewed each and every product in the niche even the content was somewhat generic, but i didn't see this happening this year with much betetr content than in 2010. However I suppose it is possible with a 500+ pages of products reviews on a site to rank for pretty much anything. So I guess it would be even easier with your approach. Yet real unique content costs a lot, so i would think twice before I invest $2500 in a site that may never rank. Your method is definitelly better but still costs a lot to take off.

moonlighsunligh said:

Then how do you know you would be able to rank for the term no other young sites did?

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On-page SEO matters. The weighting of keywords, keyword densities -- this stuff is a huge part of Google's algorithm. I'm not even going to claim that I'm an expert at it ... I'm good enough at it to get any page unpenalized from stuffing. But, when I've got a top 15 page, I test and tweak it continually. What if I stick that keyword near the front of the title? What about the end of the title? Separate it with a dash - attach a modifier to it. I keep on tweaking until it ranks like I want it to. This process can take weeks, even months, especially if I'm on a million-exact keyword and my changes (along with backlinks) are the difference between #15 and #5 and fitting all the longtails along with it.

The good news is that Google updates their content filter nearly immediately after you make changes -- so you can be tweaking your onpage SEO every 48 hours, and switch it back if any particular change was a bad idea.

When I go into a niche, I don't go in as a "young site". I'll get my top 50 results with content alone, no matter what the keyword is (ok on a million exact I'm happy with top 200). At this point, after my content is tweaked, I pull out my big-boy tools. I'll then finish the job with my network.

The point is -- you can be profitable without a blog network. You start with the 500 exacts. You start making your money and you start buying your expired domains. You buy just 1, and beef up your most profitable term. Then, even more money comes in. You buy another domain, and you snowball it until you can rank any keyword you want.

moonlighsunligh said:

Yet real unique content costs a lot, so i would think twice before I invest $2500 in a site that may never rank. Your method is definitelly better but still costs a lot to take off.

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This entire thread is about how insanely profitable it is for you to write your own articles. If I haven't made the specific point yet, I'll make it now -- all content writers are crap. Nobody cares about your site ranking but you. This is a guide so that you can understand exactly how to write yourself. It sounds like you're pouting because you can't throw $2500 at other people to write a site for you, without some guarantee you won't lose. Here, I'll help you -- you'll lose. Don't do it. Its a stupid idea.

moonlighsunligh said:

However I suppose it is possible with a 500+ pages of products reviews on a site to rank for pretty much anything.

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I just made a long post about how making product reviews is a failed idea, what thread are you reading? lol ... sorry don't mean to criticize but every point you're making its like you're trying really hard to do the exact opposite of what I suggest.

I'm glad you made this thread, it's certainly picked up speed since its release.
Been helping a relative with product reviews and I see what you mean. Perhaps this will aid us in banking hard via adsense and amazon. Passive income sure doesn't hurt even though it's not my forte.

phpbuilt said:

This entire thread is about how insanely profitable it is for you to write your own articles. If I haven't made the specific point yet, I'll make it now -- all content writers are crap. Nobody cares about your site ranking but you. This is a guide so that you can understand exactly how to write yourself. It sounds like you're pouting because you can't throw $2500 at other people to write a site for you, without some guarantee you won't lose. Here, I'll help you -- you'll lose. Don't do it. Its a stupid idea.

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I now mostly do writing myself. But yes it takes some time, even using Dragon naturally speaking.

phpbuilt said:

I just made a long post about how making product reviews is a failed idea, what thread are you reading? lol ... sorry don't mean to criticize but every point you're making its like you're trying really hard to do the exact opposite of what I suggest.

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I said this just to illustrate that it could even be possible to rank for some product keywords with few backlinks, so it is surely possible to rank for non-product keyword and much more profitable since as per your analysis it is much easier. So, I did read the thread and and agree with your analysis. If I am choosing between making a page about Sony Walkman MP3 Player Review or MP3 Player with Bluetooth I would always choose the second one.