Until recently, it was assumed that the best way to improve search engine rankings for your website was to liberally sprinkle a group of relevant key words throughout your site. But in the rapidly growing and increasingly competitive Internet of today, specialization is necessary.

General key words no longer work well, nor do a wide array of keywords or phrases. The main goal, of course, is to be the number one listing (or at least on the first page) in Google, Yahoo, and/or MSN when internet users type your phrase into the search box.

Today, it is a good idea for each individual page of your website to be primarily optimized around a single phrase. That’s certainly not to say that you shouldn’t use other key phrases as well, but giving one of them priority is a wise strategy. That’s what we mean by specialization – a single well-focused key phrase.

Your primary phrase should be something that people are likely to type into a search engine, and it should also be descriptive of your page’s content.

You will generally see better results when your pages are optimized for more specific “niche” terms, rather than highly competitive terms that lots of people are trying to rank for. That’s why it can be much more effective to choose a creative two to five word key phrase rather than single key words with lots of competition, such as “travel” or “finance”.

Finding a relevant, popular key phrase that you will realistically be able to rank for certainly isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth doing. In today’s competitive world, you need every edge you can get. If you would like help implementing or updating your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), please contact us.