Over the last month, I've been focusing on targeting 1-2 big keywords for my niche with the hopes of getting onto the front page. I'm close.. currently 18 on one keyword, and 4th page on another. I'm still fairly new to SEO, so that was based on using only one of the many different SEO strategies. However, in analyzing my organic traffic generated in the last 30 days, I've found most of my traffic to come from smaller terms. That leads me to this question: Do you think its better to optimize your site based on smaller keyterms (say for me: artist names, song names, album names in each particular post?), or more general terms (name of music genre)? Currently, I've been focusing my off-site SEO still on the bigger, more general terms, but I've really been making a concentrated effort on on-site SEO targeting with each post - targeting the smaller terms for that post. I would think that a mixture of the two would be most beneficial, but figured I'd ask those of you who have more experience than I do. Thanks. BTW, how can I have it so my latest blog post shows underneath my name on the Digital Point forums?
You are definitely on the right track. I agree with pretty much everything in your post. I think you should target many lower volume precise phrases. Those phrases will be easier to get traffic from and the traffic is better quality. The traffic from general search terms is often not looking for what you are offering. If you target lots of lower volume phrases that overlap those general phrases, then you will still be gradually improving your general term rankings. Once those general term rankings are higher, you can concentrate more on them. One downside of concentrating too much on 1 or 2 phrases is that it can lead to an overoptimization penalty if too many of your links use the exact same link anchor text. By the way, you should try to diversify your strategies. You never know which strategy Google is gonna target with their next algorithm update. So if you use several strategies you won't lose rankings as easily. Using several strategies helps make all the search engines like your website too.
i did not get, what do u mean my big keyword / small keyword? what i got from u is this.. big / small keywords does not make any difference in ranking. The main factor is competition for that keyword. try to boost up your site with less competitive keyword...then go for high competition.
vansterdam thanks for your response and the advice on not concentrating too much on 1 or 2 keywords. I've expanded into relevant and moderately relevant forum posting, as well as the blog posting as before. I haven't had much luck with social bookmarking, but I haven't ruled that out just yet. Nickjason, I probably chose the wrong word choice for the thread title. Rather than big and small, I should have used general and specific, or competitive versus less competitive. Thanks for the feedback both of you!