Placement of keywords (please help)

[noor_u]

Hi, I'm new to search engine optimisation, and am a little confused about the placement of keywords on a website.

If my main keyword was "Learn how to play violin", and I placed this keyword phrase in the heading, title, first paragraph etc... would it also count for the keyword "Learn how to play the violin" ?

What about in the <meta name="keywords" content="________ > section? Do I have to list Learn how to play violin AND Learn how to play the violin? Or would including only the latter be inclusive of the former or vice versa?

Nobody seems to say much about these nitty gritty things about keywords

Also, what if "effective training speed violin" had a good search:competition ratio on wordtracker? I can't put that phrase in a paragraph, so if I write something like "effective speed training for the violin", would that count as the former keyword phrase found on wordtracker?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance

[fisicx]

Forget about them. The search engines will filter out the stop words (the, to and, if etc) and just use the ones in their index.

What you should do is concentrate of writing natural copy - do it for your visitors not the search engines.

Ignore the meta keywords - the search engines already do.

Who searches for 'effective training speed violin'? Just because a keyphrase is not competitive doesn't mean anyone is searching for that phrase.

Just write normally.

What is important is to write effective page titles, possibly even mopre important than your on page copy. This means you need something like:

'Improve your violin playing with effective speed training'

[noor_u]

Thank you fisicx for your quick reply

That was very helpful. I'm actually writing my very first web page to advertise a product on clickbank. I had previously decided to start with just writing natural copy, to convince customers to go to my affiliate site. I understand that converting customers is a crucial factor, but I realise that I also have to get a top listing on the major search engines via keyword research.

I'm curious as to why on Keyword Discovery, the phrase "effective training speed guitar" has a search count of 14, but the same words arranged in a different order, e.g. "effective guitar training speed" doesn't have any results.

If the search results on KD were accurate, would that mean that if i optimised my site with the latter phrase, then I wouldn't rank for the former phrase? Or does Google also ignore the ORDER of words within a keyword phrase?

[fisicx]

The order of word in a keyword phrase can affect the search results but so can the concatenation of those words.

It also depends on the phrase itself, how the search is configured, the popularity of that phrase, the data center that carried out the indexing, the the version of google that the visitor uses, the page title, the duplication of the keyphrase in the copy, the URL, the anchor text leading to the targer page, the longevity of the site, the inbouind links, the structure of the page. The list is endless.

Don't rely on KD or any other keyword research tool. They can be useful guides but are not infallible.

More important is your choice of keywords: 'effective training speed guitar' and 'effective guitar training speed' are very long tail and will bring in so little traffic it's not worth the effort. The only way to test it would be to publish the page and see wait for 6 months to see what happens.

Yes, I did say 6 months. It can take that long for the search engines to fully index and rank a site and even longer for your to build up enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.

[noor_u]

thank you fisicx. I've realised that the only way for me to progress further would be to actually publish my website and learn on the field.

[Alby]

Good answer from fisicx, however i am not sure about the 6 months, i was under the impression that changes to pages and links etc were updated every time your site was viewed/cached/updated by google? If you use webmaster central through google you get site stats and information, and mine shows updates whenever it looks at my pages and my serps change as well. Just my opinion..

[fisicx]

As in all things, the answer is: it depends.

If you use google tools then you may well see changes more often but if you have a static site that doesn't change then it's you won't see google visit very often.

[Emma]

I agree with earlier posts: go for natural copy that reads well for your (human) visitors. Be careful through not to be too oblique in your copy, don't be afraid to spell it out. "the violin" and "violin" will both appear in search results: search engines want to find relevant pages.

As for how long it takes search engines to index new sites: it depends on the site and how much competition there is. If you create a niche site with little competition, you'll be indexed sooner. If you create a site in a crowded niche, it'll take longer.

I wouldn't completely ignore the metatags, it is worth putting a brief description in them, particularly the title tag which is seen by browsers even if the search engines ignore them. It can help as a reminder to what key words you're focused on when you're writing copy.

[MJE]

Also try to write articles and perhaps a glossary on your site about everything to do with the violin, if its a passion of yours this should come easy - visit blogs on your subject, tell them about your site and ask them to do an article linking to your site - this tactic takes some time and you will get many knock backs but it get better results in a hobby/interested type of niche than it does in a purely commercial niche as people who 'like to learn violin' want to visit other sites about the violin etc.
If you get only a few people linking to you this should really help in you niche.

Good luck

[Badge Maker]

Originally Posted by Alby

Good answer from fisicx, however i am not sure about the 6 months, i was under the impression that changes to pages and links etc were updated every time your site was viewed/cached/updated by google? If you use webmaster central through google you get site stats and information, and mine shows updates whenever it looks at my pages and my serps change as well. Just my opinion..

As fisicx said it does depend on how often Google visits your site and I also think that the age of your site does contribute to the rank you get. Google does seem to prefer the older, trusted sites to some new kid on the block, so if it's a competitive area it's tough to get anywhere near the top when you're new.

I have a fairly new site (4 months) for my name badge business and have more than a 1000 backlinks to it. For long tail searches such as staff name badges I'm on page 2, but search for the popular keywords like badges and I'm nowhere to be found. When I look at the site that's no 1 for badges they don't have many backlinks and it's not particularly optimised for search engines yet it's right up there.

Internet business can be frustrating because you can't always have the control you want.... but it is very powerful, and you definitely live and learn