Keyword or "Key Word"?

Keyword or "Key Word"?

These aren't the keywords I'm going for, but it's a good example of a problem I'm having.

I've got my site optimized for Keyword (although "Key Word" is used in my META tag), and I'm doing quite well in Google, but not getting the traffic I would like. After doing a bit of research today, and using WordTracker, I find that about ten times more searches are being done for "Key Word" than for Keyword, although Keyword is the widely accepted correct way of using the term. My site is virtually non-existent when searching for the two-word phrase "Key Word", because I haven't been optimizing for that, both onsite (or is it "on site"? lol) or through link-building.

What do I do? I could easily change the one-word keyword to the two-word phrase, but will that kill my rankings for the one word search? Will it take forever to rise back to the top for the two-word phrase?

The thing is, when searching for the two-word phrase, a lot of the results are irrelevant (pages with "Key" but not with "Word" and vise-versa), which makes me hesitant to make a change, since all of a sudden my traffic will be somewhat un-targeted.

I've been thinking of going 50/50 on my site, using KeyWord half the time in my content and "Key Word" the other half, but all of a sudden my density for Keyword, which I'm ranking well for, will be reduced by 50%. What can I expect the consequences to be of such an alteration? Also, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so it would drive me crazy to have half one way and half the other, because in my opinion my content will now have grammatical errors, and I'm afraid visitors would notice that and give my site less credit. I suppose I could just alter the ALT tags, but still, I don't know how that would affect my SERPs.

I feel like I'm going to have to start all over, especially with the link-building I've been doing, since the anchor text is all the one-word keyword.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Ps. To those who read other seo forums, I've cross-posted this at SEOChat as well because it doesn't seem like the Keyword Forums get a whole lot of traffic at each site. I hope that's ok.

 

mix it up and use both. experiment.

 

I'm doing that right now. I'm going to go about 50/50 and see what happens.

Wish me luck.

 

Good Luck

 

If you can understand the meaning of keyword and key world, you know what you are going to do? You shall ask words like website and web site, because they have the same meaning. For keyword like these, you shall decide which are used most frequently. For the website and web site, definitely I will use website, because less people will use web site.

 

i would prefer using both website and web site..

 

Which I have done. Although "keyword" is the industry-accepted way of spelling it, most searches are for "key word".

Since I made the change to 50/50, I've dropped slightly for "keyword" and have only gone from page 15 to page 13 in Google for "key word". It's been almost 3 weeks now so I wonder if it was worth it.