Dear friends

One should focus on more keyword search out per month or instead look for rather lesser searches for the keyword with which to optomize the website.
For: example i have greeting website
I try to focus the word "greeting cards" which is searched out about 200,000
and there is word "birthday e cards" which has about 15000 searches a month. What should i focus higher search word "Greeting cards" or lower search word "Birthday E cards"??.
Best regards
Joey

Both.

I don't know your site or model, so I'll use my own as an example. Do I want to optimize for "Rocky Mountains" which puts me up against stiff competition, like the National Park Service ( who I donate to ), the Rocky Mountain News, a million real estate firms, or do I go with something more specific that draws in less but better qualified traffic? They aren't mutually exclusive, actually.

Van Gogh wrote an article worth reading on this very topic: http://www.yellowhousehosting.com/re...h-engine-tail/

Without using the words, it examines things like bounce rates for different levels of specific vs generic phrases. A quote from another page on the site - which I have nothing to do with and get no benefit from ... it's just good information - is:

Optimizing your pages to meet your business goals

"Optimizing your pages to meet your business goals"
that suggest to use the keywords accordingly no matter they are searched how many times?.I hope you are saying this considering your business is relatively new for which you are targeting very hight searched out keywords

Long tail keywords are a lot easier for new sites to break into, but long-established sites can do pretty well from them, too.

Cascades gets 80,000 searches a month and Cascade Mountains another 25,000, at least according to Seo Book's keyword suggestion tool. Of that 100 K searches, I pull a few to several hundred visitors a month on search phrases involving Cascades. That's maybe half a percent. A lot of people are looking for car rentals, flights into SeaTac, real estate, renting an apartment, bus schedules ... they don't want my site. No reason to waste the bandwidth.

On the other end of the scale, the same tool shows two variations on Olallie, totaling 273 searches a month ... I have no idea how accurate the tool is, but I pull 40 to 50 visitors a month on that keywords. That's 15 % to 20 %, and they tend to stick around later, actually satisfy my goals, become repeat visitors, occasionally link to me, or tell a friend.

Obviously, anyone in their right mind would rather have the few hundred visitors for a more generic phrase than a tenth as many for a specific state park. But, to get those 40 or 50 visitors a month, I spent a day hiking in the mountains with my camera, and put up a page with one of the photos. Getting ranked for a geographic region has taken a lot more time and energy.

But the two things are: Talapus Lake brings in about the same number of visitors, with the same amount of effort. Iron Horse brings in around a hundred a month; Gold Creek Pond is another 30 or so. When you add up all the long tail traffic, it comes out to more than shorter phrases. And that you can work on both ends of the spectrum. You don't have to do one or the other, and if you do a little of both, the benefits tend to overlap.

You should really check out Van Gogh's analysis, which involves the number of searches, amount of competition, and likelihood of an actual purchase for different levels of short/long -tail key phrases.

Since I'm using my site as an example with different searches and the numbers of results they pull in, North Vancouver is more heavily searched and not a place I've spent enough time in to be really competitive. That phrase is closer to "the search head" and I'm fighting purely on merit against companies with huge budgets. I'll be back up that way in the winter to see the eagles on the way to Whistler, but considering how much more often it's searched compared to the long-tail key phrases above, I get about the same amount of traffic, for a page around this image:




The best course is to diversify ... whether it's key phrases, traffic sources, products, whatever.

I got your point and understand the techniques behind long and short phrases to some extent.
My orginal question is my website is http://www.memorygreetings.com
it is about greeting cards.I have been trying to optomize the site with keyword "birthday e cards" which has search about 15000 a month,i would like to get better ranks with "greeting cards" which is very competitive word and searched about 200,000.
What should i do?? should i try to just focus on 15000 number or 200,000 number word.
I have tried to use "birthday e cards" in anchor text(Link exchange) and used in site as contents,title,keywords,but still this keyword for my website gets listed somewhere on 8th page of google, what should i do more to get on 1st page for "birthday e cards"?

Try to get more quality one way links, write some original articles, post them on blogs and article directories, do your own usual stuff...
Also you may want to do a bit of work on your website.
I did a quick check of your metatags...have a look at this:
- Too many characters in the title
- Tooo many keywords and also to many words in the keyword field
- Keyword relevancy to page content is very poor.
- Found no robots metatag.


This is how your site is displayed in SE's

Free birthday e cards,Online greeting cards,Song dedication.Its all about Greetings
Send postal greeting cards, Free birthday E cards, Free wedding and party invitations, Love calculator, Greeting Cards, Song dedication,Send jokes, Greeting in many languages and so much more.Its all about Greetings.
http://www.memorygreetings.com

Do you like what you see? Specially the description? Does it look natural text to you or keyword stuffed?

Now give it a think and start working on it

Originally Posted by memorygreetings

My orginal question is my website is http://www.memorygreetings.comit is about greeting cards.

Because you're obviously asking for help in good faith and not a fly-by-night spammer ... maybe you meant "my web site is about greeting cards." Hopefully I'm not setting a bad precedent or giving you the wrong idea. But you seem to be doing too much "on-page" optimization, to the point where some of the meta tags you have look like keyword stuffing spam. That creates a bad impression with users ... if you step back for a moment, all of seo is only about getting users to your site ... once you do that, you have to do something with them.

But if you're only focused on optimizations on your page, that explains why "both" isn't sticking.

Originally Posted by memorygreetings

I have been trying to optomize the site with keyword "birthday e cards" which has search about 15000 a month,i would like to get better ranks with "greeting cards" which is very competitive word and searched about 200,000. What should i do?? should i try to just focus on 15,000 number or 200,000 number word.

Well, keep in mind that I'm not trying to avoid your question, but let's take a new perspective. Do you sell greeting cards ... the ones on paper, from Hallmark and all of their competition? It looks like you do the online version only. So greeting cards has 13 times as many searches against it, but how many of those are stores wanting a better deal online, or someone wanting to have something mailed for them, maybe with some roses or whatever sent along with it? You know the answer to this line of questions and I don't ... but along with what you'll need to do to overcome the competition, consider whether you're providing what the searchers want. If they "bounce" it's nothing but a waste of bandwidth ... someone looking for something particular that you don't provide is going to try a different search, not stick around and click ads or buy a different service.

I'm not trying to talk you out of targeting any keyword, just suggesting how you might evaluate your priorities. How do things change if you change to "e greeting cards?" I would imagine that one little letter will mean people who find you through a search engine stick around longer and visit more pages. That also has more overlap with "e birthday cards" ... so work you do against one will help to a lesser degree with the other.

Originally Posted by memorygreetings

I have tried to use "birthday e cards" in anchor text(Link exchange) and used in site as contents,title,keywords,but still this keyword for my website gets listed somewhere on 8th page of google, what should i do more to get on 1st page for "birthday e cards"?

Link exchanges are usually worthless. Meta keywords are completely useless ... the major search engines stopped using them in the 1990s because people would spam that tag in particular. You can use the keywords tag if you want, but it won't be used ... there really isn't much reason to. The meta description doesn't have anything to do with where you rank, but it's typically used for the little text blurb that goes under your page title in the results page.

It's not a huge step up, but if I were you, I think the first thing I would do is stop all the link exchanges, and spend some time getting a bunch of one-way links from as many directories as possible. Only the free ones ... most aren't worth paying for, although there are a few exceptions. Directories tend to be low quality links, but higher quality than having more than a few reciprocal links.

That would put you in a situation a bit better than the one you're in today. The next "easy" step would be to write a few articles and syndicate them. Again most of the links you'll get are of lower-middle quality, but probably a step up from directories. Of course this depends on the quality of your articles; if they're great, they'll be picked up by more and better sites. The idea is to sprinkle a few links into the articles you write, that will wind up on some number of other peoples' sites.

Ultimately though what you need are links that you didn't create yourself. And from as many different domains as possible ... ones that aren't under your control.

memorygreetings why would you only optimize your site for one or the other. You wouldn't really optimize your site for a particular phrase. You'd optimize a page for that phrase and your site around different groups of keyword themes.

Why not have a section of your site built around greeting cards and another build around birthday cards. Looking at your site I suspect you already have these kind of categories.

You should be able to find hundreds if not thousands of different phrases for your site. You're not trying to optimize for one phrase. You want to optimize different pages of your site for different phrases. Maybe 2-4 phrases per page.

Also know that phrases that get searched more likely have more competition. You won't automatically be able to rank well for a specific phrase just because you've chosen it and performed basic on page optimization. While you're building links to compete on the more competitive terms it makes sense to also focus on less competitive terms to still get search traffic.

Forrest, you've learned so much. I'm gald you like my article.

Thank you guyz..no picture is getting bit clearer
I definitly going to work over the things you mentioned forrest and vangooh

Have you heard of "aboutus?" Have a look at my listing and do something like this yourself. You can put links with optimized anchor text there; it's actually their stated goal to cover the web as a wiki, with descriptions, reviews, and such about each site ... they'll pull the content from your home page by default, but encourage people to write their own description.

The link really won't count for much, some minor benefit for having a one-way link, but it's a starting point. But the best thing you can do is socialize with people who would appreciate your cards ... probably a good target market is parents.

Originally Posted by vangogh

You should be able to find hundreds if not thousands of different phrases for your site. You're not trying to optimize for one phrase. You want to optimize different pages of your site for different phrases. Maybe 2-4 phrases per page.

Precisely the point. Writing about your product, service, passion...whatever, you can't help but end up with literally hundreds of low competition phrases related to your business. On one of my sites we're ranked in the top 5 for "Costa Rica Vacation" in Google. This phrase only brings in a few percent of our organic search engine traffic. Well over 90% is made up of individual phrases.

This month we've been found for:

whapin soup
sheryl crow costa rica
hosttel voip services

and about 490 other search strings.

I'm still proud of the fact we were found for "rosy lipped bat fish".

"rosy lipped bat fish" is a good one. The oddest one I rank for is "creme king of baits" which originally happened by random, but now that I've reference the phrase in other posts I've had 3 or 4 different posts ranking for the phrase.

More seriously though I'm in the middle of doing some keyword research for a client. I brainstormed about 40 phrases and built that into a list of over 3,500 phrases with a little research. The only reason the list isn't more is because I didn't dig as deeply as I could have.

I won't use all those or even close to all those phrases when I redesign the site, but a lot of those phrases will end up being the focus of future blog posts and quite a few are suggesting new products for the business.

Joey your initial question asked about whether to optimize for "greeting cards" or "birthday e cards" In about an hour I'm sure I could come up with a list of about 50 potential phrases you could use. And those 50 would only be the obvious ones. A little research would lead to a lot more.

In fact even easier I just went to blumountain.com and grabbed what they have listed in their meta keywords tag. After getting rid of words like their company name here's what I got in under a minute.

Online Greetings
card,ecards
greeting cards
greetings,electronic cards
e cards,e-cards
electronicgreetings
email cards
e-mail
email
postcard
electronic postcard
animated greetings
holidays
holiday cards
birthday cards
friendship
hello
get well
business
thank you
anniversary
congratulations
graduation
wedding,love
romance
newbaby
sorry
thinking of you
sympathy
belated birthday
invitations
new job
retirement
moving
good luck

Now I wouldn't try to optimize for the single words, but they're all likely words you could use in longer phrases. Also if you do search for a few of these phrases you'll probably see some big name sites on the first page. It will be difficult for you to compete with them right away. Those sites have a lot of inbound links.

While you build links optimize for longer phrases.

Instead of 'greeting cards' optimize for 'belated birthday greeting cards' The longer phrase won't get the same traffic as the shorter phrase, but you'll have a better chance of ranking well for it. It also happens to contain the shorter phrase so in a sense you will also be optimizing for it as well.

By the way the ease of which I grabbed bluemountains keywords is one good reason why you shouldn't use a meta keywords tag. Why do your competitor's research for them.

By the way #2. Don't look at the bluemountains meta keywords as an example of the right way to do it if you think meta keywords are important for some reason. They use far too many. There's no way a single page could be optimized for all those words and phrases.