I am having a little bit of trouble with this and I think it is just due to lack of understanding. I have a website that is about blackjack and various betting strategies. My blog is http://blackjackbettingstrategies.blogspot.com I am reading a lot of SEO and people talk about choosing sometimes hundreds of keywords, yet I am trying to just get it ranked for one, the term "blackjack betting strategies" Am I wrong to do it this way?
I think it smart to focus on just a couple of keyterms at a time. I can understand people trying to use hundreds of keywords for larger sites with a lot of content. "blackjack betting strategies" has pretty high advertiser competition according to Google, you may want to check out the Google Keyword tool to look for some alternative keywords to focus on..... however, if this is an important keyterm for you then don't give up on it. Do a Google search for blackjack betting strategies and see who your direct competition is.
wow, thanks for the quick reply. I have a few additional questions. Say I post my whole url in a forum or on yahoo answers as http://blackjackbettingstrategies.blogspot.com Does it matter that the words aren't spaced out, or do I have to type it has Blackjack Betting Strategies with that phrase being hyperlinked? I ask because many places do not let you use html. Also, if people are just searching the term "betting strategies" or "blackjack betting" or "blackjack strategies" will my site be keyed for these since all 3 of these words are in my url?
If you really want to get better in search engine, get 10 PR3-6 website back links, you can get listed for this keyword. Get the maximum relevant back links..
The search engines should pick up the keywords in your url links, even without spaces. You are targeting a very competitive niche though. Gambling is right up there with pharmacy and porn. So it will take a lot of work to get good rankings for that search term. Have patience and don't expect results right away. Focus on your main keyword as well as or two overlapping phrases. If you over optimize for one specific phrase only, you may get penalized. You will need to build a ton of links with good link anchor text. To be completely honest, you would have much more success with less frustration if you instead target several less competitive niches. You can make money off of any web traffic. You don't necessarily have to go after the top paying traffic.
Google uses something called latent semantic indexing to rank your pages. A really simple way to explain this would be that a page that contains the words "black jack betting strategies", if written naturally, would also contain other important related keywords. For instance, a website about that keyword would also contain "blackjack rules", "gambling", "casinos", as well as other types of gambling, i.e. roulette, craps, poker, etc. What I usually do is go to the google adwords keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ... then I type in my keyword I'm researching (black jack betting strategies). The first thing I notice is that "black jack betting strategy" gets more than 10 times the volume of searches than "black jack betting strategies", so I would focus on the word strategy rather than strategies. Next, I'd look under "additional keywords to consider". I believe google generates this list via latent semantic indexing. Every good quality, high pagerank, clicked-through-to website that ranks for the term "black jack betting strategies", also contains these additional keywords, and I believe the top of the list is the most commonly associated terms on those pages. So then, a well written LSI page, that would rank well in google, the top 10 related keywords are ... black jack betting strategies winning blackjack winning at blackjack how to win at blackjack vegas blackjack rules counting cards blackjack card counting blackjack roulette strategies black jack betting how to count cards blackjack If you can use the above terms, mixed in naturally into the content of your page, it would be well written for LSI. If some don't apply, thats ok ... skip over them. That list is 198 keywords long, pick the highest rated ones that apply. Regarding focusing on additional keywords, if you want to rank well for 1 keyword term you have to also attempt to focus on its LSI related keywords as well. This is of course just 1 aspect of SEO, there are many pages with tens of thousands of backlinks that rank #1 even though they don't focus on writing quality content that ranks well for LSI.
thanks for the help so far guys! I still think I'm gonna go for the competitive keywords because that is where my interests lie, and if I do something that bores me I will likely get lazy and quit. But very good advice about the LSI, I will be sure to follow this advice.
Just to make this clear because I feel into the same pit, but don't think keywords as meta tag keywords. They are not the same. When people refer to keywords in the forums, we mean like keywords from Google's webmasters "What the Google Bot Sees" and not the meta keywords. The meta keywords is practically useless, but complete it just for whatever.
yeah thanks, I knew that but good of you to try to warn me. I still haven't gotten around to the meta tags yet.