Avoiding Keyword Suicide

Using lots of targeted keywords doesn't always translate to improved SEO for your website and business. Balancing your titles, tag and description keywords with useful and appealing content for your target audience takes a lot of time and you want to be sure you'll be rewarded for your effort by your website reaching the top of the search engines.

If you've done any research at all, or just played around with different word combinations you probably have a list of (at least I hope you have them in a list. If not, that would be a good thing to do.) 20 or more keyword phrases. As ambitious as you may be, you still won't make it to the top of any search engine for all of these keywords. Not for free anyhow. n
This is something that many people screw up and they don't understand why they're not getting good SEO results. What is missing is the focus. You need to be focused on your SEO efforts. This is the first secret you need to know for Avoiding Keyword Suicide: Create a Short, Focused List of Keywords.

Many times you will be limited in the number of keywords that you can use for SEO. While other times you can use as many as you want. Either way, you always need to use the words on your 'short list' first. Your first keywords are going to hold the most weight in the search engines. This is also true with titles. This is your second tip for avoiding keyword suicide: whenever possible, Use Your 'short list' Keywords First. You may use other keyword phrases as well, but always after your short list.

Another common mistake that is made by us do-it-yourself business owners is that we tend to alter our keyword short list with "new and better" keywords. Are these keywords actually any better? Maybe. But if you start optimizing your online material with different keywords you are likely allowing the ship to pull away with half of your passengers still standing on the dock.

What happens in this situation is that you are starting your SEO efforts all over with the new keywords. You are not going to create a larger reach (unless you already are at the top of the search engines for the short list of keywords you were using) by using more and different keywords. This goes right along with the idea of using 20 keywords for optimization. You just don't have the targeted strength to get the results you need.

So the final secret to Avoiding Keyword Suicide is to stick with your guns (or keywords) until you reach the top. Even then you will want to keep optimizing for your old keywords just to keep you at the top search engine positions.