SEO Tips for Beginners - Pages and Keywords

Most people take the wrong approach to ranking for multiple keywords when they start with SEO. They try to rank their home page for every single keyword they find instead of spreading the rankings around your entire website. I know I’ve been drilling it into your head but the fact remains that search engines are all about relevancy. If you create a page that focuses around a specific keyword and create content around that keyword it’s going to look a lot more relevant than a broader page trying to rank for 100 separate and potentially non‐relevant keywords.

The fastest way to get ranked for a keyword or keyword group is to create a page that focuses on specifically that keyword or keyword group. You might have some similar and LSI keywords that fit under the same page and keyword group. In those cases you can use the group of keywords for that page and use the variations, plurals, etc throughout the page. 

To visualize this idea lets say that I’m trying to optimize a dog training blog and these are my keywords:

• Body building resources
• Body building guides
• How to have a ripped body
• Body building tips

I can break these into 3 different pages and each page then has its own keyword theme. Assuming my website is BodyBuilding.com my URL's could be something like this:

• http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-resources (body building resources)
• http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-guides (body building guides)
• http://bodybuilding.com/how-to-have-a-ripped-body (how to have a ripped body)

Then each respective page would have it’s own content, article, infographic, etc related to the keyword/group. This is the easiest way to find content ideas when you’re doing keyword research. You can make a page for every relevant keyword you find and dominate the entire market by making hypertargeted pages like this.

The point is, don’t try to rank your home page for everything. If you’re getting more backlinks and mentions to your home page than all the inner pages combined it can look manipulative to the search engines and hurt your rankings. Think about the way that you link to OTHER websites naturally, how often do you link to the home page of a website? If it’s a website that has real content you usually link to a specific video or page that you want to share, not the home page. That’s how content is naturally shared and linked to on the web, so you need to keep that in mind when it comes to your SEO. You should always be link building, promoting, and marketing all of your content and not just your home page. Reserve the home page for the very best keywords in your niche and make the laser‐targeted keyword rich pages for all the others.