Selecting keywords for homepage

[pano]

Hello Forum ,

I am working with an online yoga equipment retailer and am trying to select keywords for their homepage <title>. Initially, I focused on 2 keywords: One is a high-level (i.e. not product-specific) keyword, "yoga equipment", that receives 5,400 monthly Google phrase searches per month. The other keyword is a more-specific keyword, "yoga mats", with 60,000 monthly Google searches. </span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">However, I'm noticing that Google is sending users who use other more-specific keywords to our homepage. For example, our search result for "yoga bolster" (1,900 monthly Google phrase searches) takes visitors to the homepage, not our page dedicated to yoga bolsters (this page is already optimized for the keywords "bolsters, yoga bolsters, etc") We have an optimized yoga mat page in our shop, but Google still sends visitors to the homepage instead.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">1. Should I add a keywords like "bolster" to the homepage title? Example: "Yoga Mats, Bolsters, Products, and Accessories." Or should I stick to high-level keywords? </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">2. Would it be a good idea to add the word "yoga" to each term: "Yoga Mats, Yoga Bolsters, Yoga Gear and Yoga Accessories"</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">I appreciate the insight and thanks for your time.</p></title>

[MozMan2]

I would be curious to know if your website home page has some inbound links point to it using anchor text with those search terms...."yoga bolsters" or "yoga mats."

There is also the possibility that your pages have similar content and Google is dropping the the other pages. Are the "yoga bolster" and "yoga mat" page indexed and ranking well? Are they competing with your home page in the results?

[mjtaylor]

To your second question: . Would it be a good idea to add the word "yoga" to each term: "Yoga Mats, Yoga Bolsters, Yoga Gear and Yoga Accessories"

I just asked a similar question on whether a city name should be repeated in the title tag. You might want to review the responses: http://www.seomoz.org/q/effect-of-repeating-keyword-in-title-effective-or-diluting/.

FWIW.

My two cents on #1: I would rather work on optimizing your bolster page as a landing page by building internal and external links to that page than optimize the home page for bolster.

[gmk1567]

You need to avoid internal competition while selecting keywords for the internal pages.

It is unavoidable using the same word for the home page to give overall idea about the site to users and search engines.

I would suggest a couple of steps to rank your preferred page for a specific keyword:

• checking anchor texts of internal and external links. "Yoga mat" page to get link for the anchor text "yoga mat".

• usage of keyword in the URL and position of keyword in the title

• checking usage of keywords in the headline, image alt tag and image title

Answers to your questions:

1. Identify the top traffic driving keywords to your site. You may use them in the home page title but don't acquire links for the home page using these keywords which may develop internal competition with your home page and internal pages.

2. Title length is very limited. So use the space appropriately.

[pano]

I should also mention that we just redid the site. The previous website didn't have any SEO and it seems like Google indexed the homepage for nearly all keywords. Now that we've redone the site-- about a week ago--Google still takes people the homepage even though we have optimized specific pages for specific keywords.

So far, I have not seen indexed versions of our product category pages appear in the search results, so no flags have gone up for page competition. in fact, Google still has some of the old website URLs indexed (Don't worry, we're using 301 redirects).

What do you think? Does Google just need some more time to re-index our site and remap its keyword associations?

(I too was hesitant to put keywords in more than one location, but after seeing people were being channeled to our homepage, I thought it  might make sense to add a few keywords there to keep its ranking up)

[pano]

Thanks for the response. I should also mention we revamped our site about a week ago. Prior to this, its SEO was not considered.. In redoing the website, we implemented your suggested steps above.  Now we have a top-down site layout that goes from broad categories to specific products. The optimization of each page matches this structure.

My hunch is that we're also still waiting for Google to completely re-index the new site, including our newly-optimized category pages. These pages also have few external links, but many internal links thanks the our new linking structure.

We will keep the title short and focus on the keywords that drive traffic to our site. Any other thoughts/suggestions are welcome, especially about get tin re-indexed.

[MozMan2]

Google is going to choose the most relevant page for the search query. I would keep your pages as tightly themed as possible.You don't want them competing with each other. You don't want the same keywords in your title tags for two different pages.  I believe the coined term is keyword cannibalization.

It's good that you have landing pages and the fact that you are not seeing them in the SERPS means that your new site is not fully indexed. A week isn't a lot of time. It can take several weeks for things to settle and your pages find their places.

I don't know what platform your site is on but it may speed the indexing process along if you use Google webmaster tools to submit a sitemap.

[pano]

Thanks for your response.

We agree on strategy. Rather than dilute other page's future value by optimizing the homepage as a keyword catchall, we should focus on link-building to our category pages.

We will also not stuff our title section. We'll use something like "Yoga Gear and Accessories."

[pano]

Much appreciated. We will ensure that no keyword appears in more than one title. Thanks for the guidance on this scenario.

[waqid]

On top of what everyone else has touched on, dont forget to look at the competition and see what they are doing. You should be able to pick up some ideas there.