I think there is a bit of confusion among new Internet marketers about what constitutes a good keyword phrase. Many new marketers will perform their keyword research then use every phrase that is offered as related by whatever tool they are using. It doesn’t matter which tool you use for your research - they will all return keyword phrases that make no logical sense. It’s your job to turn those phrases into something meaningful.

Here’s an example of what I mean. This marketer is obviously targeting the phrase “online advertising internet marketing online businesses” as it is repeated verbatim several times throughout the blog post. Can you tell me what that phrase means?

If your keyword research tool returns something of this nature as a suggestion for related keywords, take that phrase and massage it into something that makes sense. Don’t just use it because your keyword research tool suggested it.

As a general rule, don’t use any keyword phrase that repeats a word. The redundant use of “online” in this phrase is useless. The search engines will likely view it as spam and your pages won’t rank well. Secondly, choose one synonymous phrase and stick with it. “Internet marketing” and “online advertising” mean almost the same thing. Not exactly, but they are close enough that you should focus on one and let the other drop. If both phrases are important to you then write one blog post or web page that focuses on one of the phrases and another that focuses on the other. Don’t combine them. Your watering down your phrases when you do that.

Thirdly, do a little more digging on the research. Do that many people really search for “online advertising internet marketing online businesses”? I really doubt that people are searching for that exact phrase. If they are then they probably aren’t finding a lot of information because savvy marketers use phrases that actually make sense. Remember, you are writing for humans and if humans can’t make sense of your content then they aren’t going to buy what you are selling so give extra thought to how you use your keyword phrases.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: Internet marketing, keyword phrases, keyword research, seo

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Blue Chip Marketing Tips, Copywriting, SEO for Small Business, Small Business Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.