SEO 2020 FORUM

[OnlyTopResults]

OK - so by using all the tools in every keyword toolbox ever invented, I have come up with a series of keyword phrases that ought to generate some traffic for my 1st silo project. The challenge is - they're phrase matched for competitiveness and are not "proper English". Let's imagine they are, in order of sexyness:

bowel cancer symptom
early symptom bowel cancer
sign and symptom of bowel cancer
cancer bowel sign symptom
advanced cancer bowel symptom

I have 2 broad questions which are both making my head hurt!

1) I am going to commission a 1000 word article which must incorporate these, BUT, clearly most phrases don't read very well as they are. They would benefit from changing the order of the words and inserting a single word here or there. For example "early symptom bowel cancer" is crying out for the word "of" in the middle.

However if I do tweak them slightly - even just making a word like "symptom" become "symptoms" ... does that mean they then lose all of their competitive value?

2) Let's imagine I'm going for a 2% keyword density ratio when writing the article. Does that just apply to the number of times the whole keyword PHRASE appears? If it DID then, with an average of 4 words per phrase, each of the above phrases would need to appear 5 times on the page - which seems a lot!

The 2nd part of this same issue is that the individual words will obviously have their own KD and I can see the word "bowel" might be repeated too many times from a keyword density perspective.

Anybody got any asprin for my headache?

Cheers
Adrian

[jeremy]

You can tweak them to make them make
more sense. You'll still rank for them and all
the other variations.

Read this:

http://www.seo2020.com/seo-articles/advanced-keyword-research.html

When writing the body of your article on "payday loans Wisconsin", you will need to include the words "cash", "loans", and "cash loan". Do not be concerned about the order of your primary keyword either. You can rank for the keyword "payday loans Wisconsin" even if your article uses the text: "get a fast cash payday loan anytime in the great state of Wisconsin".

Jeremy

[OnlyTopResults]

Hi Jeremy - and thanks for your input. I can see from your past postings that you are WAY ahead of me, even though I am no newcomer to SEO or web design.

That http://www.seo2020.com/seo-articles/advanced-keyword-research.html link was extremely helpful, thanks. By the way, there is a great facility for researching Adwords PPC rates at https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox. Having produced your results it's dead easy to download them as a csv file for mauling about elsewhere.

So, back to my bowel problem . I can see that using the individual keywords within any given phrase, in a good grammatical way, together with related words as suggested in that SEO2020 article - CAN get results. However, purely looking at on-page optimisation for the moment, SURELY an exact match to the researched (somewhat clumsy) phrases will mean a higher ranking? Would a compromise perhaps be for one instance of the exact phrase to appear on the page and then tweaked versions a few times as well? Aiming for about 2% keyword density? Of course I remain unclear if it's the phrase or the individual words that need to meet the KD target!!

All I have read would also seem to suggest that the clumsy phrases I've listed above should all have <H1> and <H2> tags and be visible on the page - not some other re-arrangement of those words. Of course that just highlights the problem even more and just shouts out to the reader "this guy didn't go to skool"! Granted that for an Adsense orientated site this may be a little less of an issue as the objective is to get a visitor to click OFF the page, but I would just be more comfortable if the text read well.

Another issue is singular and plural instances of words - does Google 'see' and rank the singular when it sees the plural? Does "symptoms" cover "symptom" by default? This one thing is a key issue I'd like to put to bed, once and for all!

Any thoughts appreciated.

Regards
Adrian

[jeremy]

Hi Adrian,

Let's see if I were to have my writers create a 1000
word article.

bowel cancer symptom
early symptom bowel cancer
sign and symptom of bowel cancer
cancer bowel sign symptom
advanced cancer bowel symptom

I agree these phrases don't make sense as they are,
in this instance I would tweak as there is no creative
way of using them as is.

I would make my primary keyword signs and symptoms
of bowel cancer adding the [s].

The primary keyword phrase would go once in the headline,
once in the first sentence and then naturally throughout the article,
I'd say 1 to 3 percent could go up to 5 percent.

Sprinkle in these keywords naturally:

early
advanced
symptom

Even though we added the [s] you will still get ranked
for 'sign and symptom of bowel cancer' because symptom
is sprinkled in. The SE's Spider the entire article.

Also because your article is very long you can use
h2, h3, h4 tags

early symptoms of bowel cancer

advanced symptoms of bowel cancer

treating bowel cancer symptoms

Normally I just include the unique keywords
from the other keyword phrases and Not the ones
that are the same as in the primary keyword phrase
because that would increase the keyword density.

But your article is long so you have more room.
I try to keep the KD of any individual keyword
below 10 percent.

It seems like keyword density is less important
positively as well as negatively, because when
we silo every page in the silo links to every other
page in the silo. This would increase the keyword density
of those most important keywords. But Bruce Clay
says linking like this makes the theme more obvious.

You can see the animated tooth site has lots of links,
but of course we know they have high rankings.

Hope this helps.

Jeremy

[Ahri22]

What I always do, is check in Google to see what results you get when typing in a particular phrase like "bowel cancer symptom" (WITHOUT the quotation marks!)

From what I can see, NONE of the first few results have the terms "bowel cancer symptom" in that exact order...AND Google ALSO sees symptoms as symptom (if that makes sense) in that it highlights the words from your search phrase in the results it displays, and it's showing symptoms as bold. This means (to me) that you're perfectly safe using the phrase as "bowel cancer symptoms" or "symptoms of bowel cancer" or "the main symptom of bowel cancer is..." or whatever. If you use a combination of these phrases, you should rank higher than ANY of the pages that are already ranking in the top 10 in Google for that term.

Another thing - if you're creating a website about bowel cancer symptoms, then put those words in your domain name if you can! I've found that it doesn't take long to rank in the top 10 (if not #1) for my exact domain name phrases. For example, my website http://waystoworkfromhome.com is #3 in Google out of 661 MILLION results (for the search: ways to work from home), and that site's only been in existance since the beginning of June. Most of my sites with fewer competing results are #1 in Google after the same period of time (or less).

Cheers
Fiona

[OnlyTopResults]

Thanks for that very detailed reply Jeremy - exactly what I was hoping for.

To pick up on some of your points ...

[OnlyTopResults]

[jeremy]

I don't think it is neccessary to be so analytical,
especially with what we are learning at seo2020.

The big difference now is that the SE's are ranking
according to how well a theme is covered.

It would stand to reason if you have one article about
bowel cancer symptoms
that has the on-page factors perfect, but some else
has a series of articles linked together about bowel
cancer symptoms, early signs, advanced symptoms,
treating the symptoms, etc they will rank higher.

Its makes sense, I see why google is doing this.
It forces people to produce more quality content
on a specific topic.

Keyword density and links are not as big a part of the equation.
I've seen sites rank higher than mine only because they had
more internal links pointing to that page, BUT there was no
content Only links. My page had content.

On the other hand when I search for a keyword for one
of my articles and it ranks, when I click through it goes
to the sitemap I think because the sitemap has a link
with proper anchor text to the article.

That must mean they value links and anchor text more
than just text on a page. The directory structure combines
both.

I use the root keyword in my domains along with
as adjective to describe the site for branding.

What would you rather click bowelcancersymptoms.com
or

allaboutcancer.com

fightingcancer.com

thecancer-experts.com

You should rank high for bowel cancer symptoms
because you cover the theme very well, not because
of keywords in the domain.

Jeremy