One Keyword to Rule Them All & Through Google Find Them

There’s still a certain amount of mystery and even mysticism that surrounds SEO. People still refer to it as ‘a dark art’, and users can marvel at how the alchemy of combining certain words can turn leads into gold. And with terms like ‘white hat’, ‘black hat’, and ”horcrux’, it’s easy to get it confused with a Lord of the Rings novel, or a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Okay, ‘horcrux’ isn’t an SEO term, but it sounds like it could be.

At MB Web we like to demystify SEO. It’s not some arcane, unknowable power that is learnt through pagan sacrifice and ancient tomes – it’s a contemporary, malleable practice that is developed through best practice and Google. An exercise we like to do when we’re trying to really whittle down a site to its bare bones is the ‘one keyword challenge’.

Imagine your business was only allowed one keyword

If this was the case, what would it be? How would you implement it? Necessity is the mother of invention, so when you place restrictions on your creativity it can often provide surprisingly useful results. You now run a jewellery company and the keyword you want to rank for is ‘buy jewellery online’.

What’s in a name?

Your jewellery company is called ‘Fellowship of the Bling’. Pretty clever name, but does it work online? It could get easily confused with one or two other things for sure. So, from an SEO perspective we need to exemplify what it is you actually do. Immediately, let’s just dump the keyword in there – ‘Fellowship of the Bling – buy custom jewellery online’.

But wait! Aren’t there a couple of issues with this? For one thing, ‘jewellery’ can also be spelt ‘jewelry’, and maybe even some other ways I haven’t thought of! And you went and stuck ‘custom’ in the middle of our keyword!

Well, yeah, you’re right. But Google’s pretty smart – for one thing, it can sift through common spelling differences, and even mistakes, so you don’t need to worry about that. And just because we’ve put custom to split the infinitive, it shouldn’t affect our ranking.

The Rite Site

Your URL is important. If we only had one keyword, we would either include it in the main URL, or simply append a page that has it. So, if our homepage was fellowshipofthebling.com, we would then have the following page: fellowshipofthebling.com/buy-jewellery-online

Incantation

Next up is content – we would want our H1 to be Buy Jewellery Online, so nobody is under any illusion as to what we do. We sell jewellery, and we do it online!

Glittering Content

Rich content is important. We need to get at least 300 words onto this page, and ensure our keyword density is high, but not too high! This balance takes practice, expertise, and patience.

A Call to Arms

Call to actions could also have the keyword in, to really hit that message home!

Let’s Get Metaphysical

Meta data is just as important as your live text and the things that people can see. Alt attributes for images, meta descriptions, SEO titles, the works. This all needs to include your keyword to make sure you rank on Google.

One Keyword to Rule Them All

And if we were optimising the site for a single keyword, we would then observe the success of our optimisation, review, change, and continually alter the content until we were satisfied that users were able to find the site based on our criteria. This is an ongoing job that can never end until you’re getting the results you want, and there is no strict science to it – but it’s certainly not magic.

But when you imagine that you may have to optimise your site for, let’s say, fifty keywords, you can begin to see the sheer breadth of SEO and how it can be the difference between rolling a fail, or scoring a critical hit with a d20.

We provide SEO support to companies all over the South East, including Brighton. If you would like help with your SEO, or are looking for cost effective SEO solutions, don’t hesitate to contact us today.