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August 22, 2005

The Zen of Keyword Proximity

I'll be the first to admit I don't give this blog the love it deserves, and that needs to change. I was looking through my logs today and was interested to see all the weird little search terms that I'm on the first page of Google for, and that people are actually using to find this site.

It's all very long tail. I'm getting lots (well, a fair amount) of hits on phrases that are probably only searched on a few times a month, tops.

For example, I'm on the first page for things like:

google reinclusion
adsense clickfraud

Hardly competitive keywords, but each brings in a trickle of traffic.

The other thing I noticed was that, in many cases, I'm outranking much more powerful blogs, like the venerable SearchEngineWatch blog, based totally on the keyword order and proximity in the title of my web pages. We get so caught up in links these days that it's easy to forget the important role that well-placed keywords still play.

You've heard the phrase "BLOGs stand for Better Listings On Google". Well, it's largely because of things like this that the phrase is true. Blogs facilitate the creation of lots of short content pages that let you target a large number of niche keywords. And the experience described above underscores the importance of carefully choosing your web page titles with an eye to what niche keywords people might be searching for, and who you'll be competing with.

For example, I almost titled this post "The Zen of Keyword Order", until I realized that there's about 23 million other pages aimed at ranking for "keyword order". With 634,000 returned results, "keyword proximity" is a much more attainable goal.

Of course, it's also important to write catchy titles that inspire people to click. I've got maybe 100 feeds I subscribe to, and I find myself just scanning the titles of each post and grabbing only those that look fun or interesting (maybe that's why I'm mostly reading ThreadWatch these days). That's why this post is titled "The Zen of Keyword Proximity" instead of just "Keyword Proximity". There's nothing to do with Zen here, I just thought people might be more likely to click on that title. And if you're reading this, maybe I was right.

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