Here are my questions in relation to Organic SEO and not PPC issues: We run an ecommerce site that sells gifts. Our sales are often tied to key holidays. Should you list the holiday keyword in the Title Tag when you have a product that would make a good gift for that holiday or should you just stay focused on product keywords only? For example: Selling a gold pocket watch you could use a title tag that says something like: Gold Pocket Watch makes an ideal Father's Day Gift or Retirement Gift Then put Father's Day Gift and Retirement Gift in the Keywords, Meta Description and repeat them within the actual page content. We do also optimize pages for Father's Day Gifts, Retirement Gifts and all of the main occasion. I just need to know if we should optimize these words when they apply to a product. On a related subject, if you have categories that can be described by two different keywords, should you create two categories or just select one of the terms? How far should you take this? When should you set up separate pages versus combining the terms? For example sympathy gifts and funeral gifts: Should these be two separate categories even though the products that would be featured are the same? With our site we do have the ability to optimize two pages but leave one of the category pages out of the menus. The page would still be in the site map so the search engines would pick it up. Leaving it out of the main navigation would avoid having menus with too many options but still allow us to optimize more than one category. I do understand that we would have to create separate descriptions on the page so that duplicate content would not be an issue. I just keep reading that related and similar words help with the ranking so it would seem to me that having the terms sympathy and funeral on the same page would meet that requirement but then I read that you should always have the main keyword in the title tag and the main headline on a landing/category pages and that these need to be focused on only one term. The instructions seem a little contradictory in this circumstance. Thanks for the clarifications. Joey
If your products are related to Key holidays, then they are likely to be used as keyword search phrases by a potential customer.
You are 100% over analyzing this.. 1) Gold Pocket Watch makes an ideal Father's Day Gift or Retirement Gift. IMO this is a bad title because its too diluted. Its best to stick with a few words in a title then a huge long sentence. I would change keywords, lets say Gold Pocket Watch on one page and Father's Day Gift on the next. 2) I think Sympathy and Funeral Gifts should could be separate or the same page it doesn't matter that much. I think the big thing here, is that you don't over optimize when I first got into SEO I mind fu**ed this kind of stuff all the time, KISS (keep it simple stupid) is now the method of choice for me. I'm regularly surprised by Google, MSN and Yahoo at keywords they rank my sites for, keywords I barley optimize for.. I remember I was going for a state specific keyword, going against all the big associations and such in the area for this keyword, a keyword that receives over 40k searches per month.. Anyway I built 2 totally different sites, one was the company name which sucked for SEO and the other was a nice SEOed keyword rich domain name. Both the sites had 100% unique content, on the nice SEO rich keyword site I went after 5 keywords in this niche, anyway immediately the SEOed site was sitting on the front page of Google, Yahoo and MSN almost over night and the main company site that had some lite SEO, honestly I didn't think about SEOing that site much was no where to be found. I started 100% unique link campaigns for each site, within the next 2 months my SEOed site was droping in the SERPs and the unSEOed site was raising, now I happen to dominate the keyword I was going for because: 1) Competitor A sits right at #1 for my keyword 2) UnSEOed site #2 3) Some other Competitor here 4) Some other Competitor here 5) Some other competitor here 6) SEOed Site here So I did have related back links and I did put in the keywords the NONseoed site site, at first I was like how in the heck does this crapy nonSEO site rank better then the site I put in a lot of work researching Title Tags, and H1 tags etc.. (they where different by the way, close but different). I keeping your onsite content good and to the point with some keyword dropping here and there will be ok, then make sure ALL your backlinks are linking to the right part of the site with the right anchor text.. you'd be supprised what keywords you might come up with.. But don't over optimize..