The Consistency Precept - Part II

Over on the Network Solutions Online Marketing Blog, I wrote about the consistency precept. this is the idea that once you find a profitable keyword, you need to apply it consistently throughout each on-page element to a new Web page. This works - in fact, it is how I have made many pages on various Web sites rank. There is a corollary to this - the multi-word content page corollary...

When you are trying to rank for a specific word, sometimes there are other terms that are very closely related and mean the same thing. Most often, it does not make sense to create separate pages for two words that mean essentially the same thing. This comes up also with words that have different spellings, each of which may be correct, or at least accepted.

How do you spell "go-cart?"

Is it gocart, go cart, go kart, go-cart, go-kart, or gokart? Each of these words will have different measures of traffic and competition. So it will be up to the SEO to determine which one you should focus your efforts on. Or, possibly even use both versions. You'll need to be careful of course, because you don't want to come off as having poor grammer or spelling.

I did a quick test in Google to see what happens with these variations... in fact, you do get different rankings/results with "go-carts" vs. "go carts." Interestingly, go-cart produces a pair of YouTube results at the top of the SERP and Google Image results at the bottom of the page. "Go Cart" (no hypen) on the other hand, produces three product results at the top of the SERP, with additional "go cart" related products available via Google check out. Although you can click on the "images" button on the SERP to get images, there were no image results displayed.

This quick test showed that there is a difference in the smallest change in keyword.

In a less obvious example, you may well want to optimize a single page for two words that mean substantially the same thing: "Antiaging skin care" and "anti aging skin products." With this, you'll be covering many bases. Just select the one with a higher overall profitability and focus on that version. The sprinkle the secondary version in - perhaps an H2 tag and some of the body copy.

Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to optimize a single page for a single keyword. It is okay to focus on two words on one page. For maximum effectiveness, I wouldn't do more than that.