As a relative newbie to SEO...

... I would just like to ask for some general advice about my stategy.

I'm going for optimising the site www.hypnosisaudiocds.com but it is intended to sell a range of hypnosis products, each which need a different search term... soooo

1. I am selecting a search term for each product page
2. I am then comparing my page with the top 10 results in Google for things like density, alt and meta tags etc and altering my page accordingly (this is more, I suspect, to ensure I don't over use the search term)
3. I am including the search term in the page URL and using a 301 redirect from the old page (?query... can I then simply remove the old version of the page from the site?)
4. I've used Eric's Freebie script to offer customers hypnosis products from Amazon, but I've modified the page so that my navigation links appear on the new pages, thus increasing all the internal links

Some how, I suspect that I also need to obtain links from external sites with the relevant search terms in the anchor text, but this seems like a ridiculous task as I intend to grow my product range. Currently I have 8 product pages that each will have at least one search term I'm optimising for.

My other concern is that, since most of my search terms contain the word hypnosis (insomnia hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, blood pressure hypnosis, self hypnosis....) and my current strategy includes using these terms in page urls and in the internal anchor text, am I likely to be penalised for overuse of the word hypnosis??

One oddity I've noticed is that, according to Shawn's tool, I come NOWHERE for the search term "blood pressure hypnosis" but the following page (which is an affiliate page from a friend) www.23nlpeople.com/Adam_Sargant_CDs.htm comes 8!!! And the page is almost a complete copy of the catalogue on my own front page... most bizarre

Anyway, I would be grateful for any hints on improving my search engine optimisation strategy, as well as how to approach getting links from external sites that contain such a mix of keywords.

TIA

 

Hi Adam
At the present time, ranking well in Google for comepetitive terms is a matter of having enough anchor text links pointing to the page you wish to rank well.

The Page title should also contain the phrase in the anchor test and your page should be well optimized for the same term with one term targeted per page (or two or three if they are close variations of the term).

Comparing your pages with the top ten ranking pages is a great way to ensure that you have your on page optimization up to snuff, but you need to check out their anchor text backlinks too.

 

Hi Mel...

Thanks for that... this is pretty much what I suspected. So somehow I'm going have to change my links strategy so that I can generate links back to all my different product pages

How do other people do that?

 

One way is to use internal menu links with anchor text.

 

Now that I am doing

That was I meant by using Eric's Freebie package but modifying it to include my navigation menu... It gives me about 130 extra pages all with my navigation links on.

I am worriewd about over use of the word hypnosis though, since each search term for each page contains that word

 

Hi Mel...I have the same problem. My site is country specific so the country name seems to come up a lot across the site. Individually as well as combined with other keywords. Because of that when analyzing on non exact search phrases the density goes way up. have asked for opinions about that in a couple of forums and everyone seems to shy away from answering or giving an opinion. maybe that's part of the top secret SEO stuff?

Lou

 

There's no such thing...

As long as the copy reads well, you should be fine.

Don't overdo it and make really spammy pages, but dropping your kewords into the page copy is good...

If it looks odd, then change it - otherwise keep it how it is.

All that really matters is links.

 

Thanks for the reply. The copy reads Ok it's just that when you analyze density it gets up to about 15% or more which many consider too high. When checked using exact matching the numbers come down in line with the top 10 sites but we're still no where in the SERPS. So I can't help but wonder if it's all the other occasions of the single country word that is causing problems? Maybe I'll just have to experiment and take out some words and see what happens and hope we don't go even lower?

Lou

 

15% does seem quite high...

Maybe try to bring it down a bit (Dendity doesn't really make a diference, it's about how many times it's mentioned, not the %)...

If it's at 15% you should be OK, but just to be on the safe side, I would bring it down a bit.

 

I suggest that you look at the page content of pages that are ranking high on the keywords you are discussing. That will give you some indications of what works and what doesn't, but IMO keyword density is not a factor in most search engines.

Google sidesteps the problem rather neatly by giving succesivly less credit to each repitition of a term until it reaches a point that further repititions recieve no credit at all.

 

Cool... makes sense... how do we know this, as a matter of curiousity?

I tend to find myself thinking "if I were writing a search engine algorithm, how would I do it?"

 

This inforamtion is from the original Google paper "Anatomy of a large scale hypertextual search engine"