In one of my previous posts about getting back to the basics, I mentioned that applying attributes and characteristics to keywords is a great way to get traffic with ease. If you don’t remember I’ll give a brief summary here.
Let’s say that you have a site on dress pants. And let say there is a keyword you want to rank for like “pleated dress pants”. I don’t know how tough it is to rank for such a keyword and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that people are looking for attributes and characteristics of pleated dress pants. This means that you can go after things like:
black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
white pleated dress pants
tight pleated dress pants
baggy pleated dress pants
cotton pleated dress pants
You get the idea with those examples. People search all of those terms. Some might only have a few dozen searches a month and others will have a few hundred. The big thing I was trying to illustrate in my previous post was that this type of term is relatively easy to rank for if you target it.
I did a little experiment to see how this would end up working if applied two different ways. This experiment isn’t scientific in anyway, as I used different niches and the number of links may differ. I’ll give the examples as if they were pleated dress pants related. All pages are in the sub-directory of the main domain name.
Method A
Pleated Dress Pants main page that links to the following pages:
black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
yellow pleated dress pants
…
etc
Method B
Pleated Dress Pants main page that contains all the different keywords (or slight variations) within the pages content (obviously much longer piece of content).
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The question boils down to which one had better results from a search engine point of view. Personally I like method A better because you have laser targeted pages, which pretty much guarantee a click in the search results. Before starting I suspected method B would be the winner.
The Winner? Method B.
When you compare the attributes/characteristic keywords between the two you don’t notice that much of a difference. Some of the keywords hit the front page and some didn’t. With method B, the pages that did hit the front page were much closer to number 1, with many hitting it.
The big difference that separates the two is that the main keyword (pleated dress pants) is shuffling around position 10-12 with method B. With method A it is no where to be found and it makes sense. The fact is that when you build a link for red pleated dress pants, you’re also building a link for pleated dress pants.
I want to point out that this method isn’t as scientific as I’d like it to be. I didn’t send a lot of links to have conclusive results. But I did send fewer links to method B than I did to method A.
Mr. Obvious
This should bring home the obvious point. You should never be building pages of content targeting one keyword. There should always be other related keywords that you put in there. You don’t have to use a high density of those bonus keywords. One time or even zero times works fine. The point is that when you start building links to the page you focus equally on all the keywords you put in.