Basic keywords question - words vs phrases

MOH

Is it better to use phrases or just single words as keywords?


e.g. if I had a cookery school website, would I be better off with:
cookery school, cookery lessons, learn to cook

or
cookery, school, lessons, learn

Do I get a better score from matching the exact phrase than from matching two keywords which appear in close proximity?

515

I was wondering this too... everything I read says you should use contextual paragraphs, but does that actually provide better ranking? Or does it increase the click-through rate once people see you on a search?

Freshie

Theres a bit of research on this and in summary you are probably better off to use phrases rather than single keywords. A company called 'onestat' did some research showing that the majority of people type in between 2-4 keywords in a phrase rather than singular in an effort to get a better search result.

I had a good example of this recently where a client was selling a specific brand of inkjet printer. They ran an Adword campaign using the 'broad' singular word 'printers'. This puled in anyone looking for T-Shirt printers to business card printers to Canon Printers. A singular keyword will produce high traffic but less relevant customers. Better to narrow down and get purchases than high traffic that will cost you a lot and produce little sales.

Run you web address through https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This will show you relevant keyword and phrase ideas matched to your site as well as the volume of local and global searches and level of competition for these over the last month.

MOH

Excellent, thanks for that.

link8r

people definitely use phrases but Google is very adept at grabbing phrases from sentences in a page anyway.

Remember that Keywords dont rank sites - they are just "hints" to Google as to which index you belong.

Think of it this way - how can you make yourself more relevant for a search phrase than soemone else? How can you make yourself more authoritive? You can't...Just like you can't vote yourself into power...you need other people to give you that authority - Google has the same voting system.

When you do a search on the web, you can see Google conjoining words out of sentences even, for example "are the finest hotels. In Dublin, each year" - Google can easily conjoin "hotels. In Dublin" as "hotels in dublin" by ignoring the characters like the full stop and capitalisation. Which it does. Often.

Your rank is affected by your overall authority and we believe that your authority is relevant to the indices you find yourself.

When Google does a search, it hardly searches all of the pages it's cached - that would take too long - yet thats how most people think Goole works.

Google has predefined indices with preset results for each region, like this:

1. hotels
2. Hotels Dublin
3. Hotels in Dublin

Each of these has a type of pre-prepared index - at least this is "our" thinking - granted, I haven't worked inside Google and they don't publish any kind of intricate information either but it seems logical to assume this.

So Google gets the picture of what your site is talking about by reading it - everything. So if you stick in keywords that don't match your content, don't expect a high position in that index etc.

This is my understanding of Google for the last, 8/9 years and I haven't had too many problems ranking a couple of hundred domains.

Best of luck!

blue4ever

Follow the punters - not the spiders!

If the average Joe has a appetite to learn to Cook (Pun intentional as its Friday), then what will the do?

They sit down and search for,
Cookery Lessons,
Cookery School,
Learn to Cook,
Cookery Lessons Cork/Mallow/Antrim.

If that's what they are searching for, then give them those answers. I am not oversimplifying this, but I believe that searches are driven by human input - so its probably a very good place to start.

D.W

Just to add a comment-you could also use wordtracker or similar tool to get a decent idea of the type of phrases and potential traffic they could bring IF you ranked for them. Takes a little of the guesswork out of it and is by no means accurate-focuses more on Google.com but if you but the non free version can be insightful.