Keywords in Titles: Divide and Conquer or Longtail Keywords to Get Hits

Choosing the keywords in article, website and blog titles is very important for being read, found and making money in various ways through ads and sales. There is a classic dilemma involved.

Should your write multiple linked articles like independent chapters of a book or installments published in a newspaper and hope the readers will click from one to another. If this happens you will earn income twice or three times from the display of ads.

Your ads can be better targeted and will be more likely to earn income from Adsense. Its a bit like fishing - if you multiply the number of lines you cast out into the Internet the more chance you will catch a fish. If you use multiple baits and cast into multiple habitats your chances of catching a fish will be even better.

But if each of the titles is too narrow and specific no one will read your publication and you will get more hits. The alternative strategy is to carefully craft your title to increase the number of keywords in it so that this will increase your chances of getting hits. To continue the fishing analogy it is a bit like putting multiple types of baits on the one line. Google will index your publication based on every individual keyword in the title and every combination of the keywords. So the number of baits is expanded well beyond the number you could physically choose and add to the line. See this article for more details.

So what the cutoff point, and how do you decide whether to publish multiple articles, blogs or websites or to use a multiple key word title?

The answer lies understanding the concept of competition for longtail keywords and relative hit rates. See: How to Optimize Keywords and SEO Titles - Use Popular Multiple Keywords

The table below summarizes data extracted from Google's Keyword tool for three searches with the [exact] option:

green tea heath benefits
green tea extract health benefits
organic green tea health benefits

The headings for the data shown are

• Difficulty (not part of the Google Keyword Tool) - Competition estimate as a percentage - lower vale means less competition
• Global Monthly Searches - Number of hits per month
• CPC - Cost per Click, what an advertiser will pay for the keyword
• Average Links - Average number of links for pages with the keyword

Theoretically you could publish a whole series of linked articles, blogs or websites including:

• green tea - 66 [110,000]
• benefits of green tea - 38 [60,500]
• health benefits of green tea - 34 [6,600]
• green tea benefits - 34 [40,500]
• tea health benefits - 34 [880]
• health benefits of tea - 43 [1900]
• green tea weight loss - 49 [22,200]
• green tea health benefits weight loss - 37 [16]
• organic green tea - 50 [1,900]
• organic green tea health benefits - 40 [12,000]
• green tea extract - 49 [12,100]
• tea extracts - 56 [260]
• green tea extract weight loss - 46 [1,300]
• green tea extract heath benefits - 31 [36]
• green tea and health - 34 [110]
• organic green tea extract - 48 [140]
• black tea health benefits - 34 [1,000]

However that data shown next to each title is the relative competition (as a percentage) and the [number of global searches a month]. These data show that many of these would be hopeless in terms of competition and searches per month.

Lets apply

• a competition cutoff of below 40 (low-medium) and
• a traffic cut off of greater than 1000 per month.

The competitive ones with poor traffic (much too low) are:

• green tea health benefits weight loss - 37 [16]
• green tea extract heath benefits - 31 [36]
• green tea and health - 34 [110]

The ones that are both competitive and have reasonable traffic are:

1. tea health benefits - 34 [880] (marginal)
2. green tea benefits - 34 [40,500]
3. benefits of green tea - 38 [60,500]
4. health benefits of green tea - 34 [6,600]
5. black tea health benefits - 34 [1,000]
6. health benefits of back tea - 33 [720] (Marginal)
7. green tea weight loss - 49 [22,200] (Marginal)

But notice that some of these are very similar and have altered word orders.

Separate articles on each of them would be hard to justify.

The compromise could be to write three linked articles

green tea health benefits
green tea weight loss benefits
black tea health benefits

I have put the 'green tea' and 'black tea' first because of 'autosuggestion' . See: Channelling by Google Instant and Autocomplete threatens Longtail Keywords

Note: The Keyword suggestion tool can be misleading for long tail words because it only shows the traffic for the entire phase. An article with a complex longtail set of keywords would be indexed for ALL the individual keywords and every combination including reordering of words.

As an alternative you could write one article with the title:

Benefits of green and black tea for weight loss

which would cover all the bases.

Shown in the images below are the Google search result for two phrases showing that Google cherry picks the words, and word combinations in presenting the results.

The pages appearing in the search results don't have to include all the words.

Some sites with high PR will dominate the search results for many of the keyword phrases.

Google compiles are score for each word and combines the scores for the search phrase to determine which page to display in the search results, and what order they will appear in.

Including more keywords in the title will mean that the article will have the chance to be indexed or every word in the title and every combination.

The words appearing first in a title have higher index scores.

There is a trade-off for very long and complex titles as Google may regard it as keyword stuffing. Also adding more words lowers the index scores for every word in the title.

Comments about The Hubpage Title Tuner

The Title Tuner tool offers suggestions for words you could add to your title to enrich it and hopefully get more traffic. It displays popular words that appear commonly in search results for your title that you have not included. The suggestions are ranked by their percentage popularity in the search results. For example, one particular word may be in 22% of the search queries, but it is not in the title. Adding these words may increase the number of hits for your article. It is a shame that this tool can only be used after an article is published. This tool does not include competition analysis and keyword popularity is only half of the story.

What do You Think? Is this the Way you Choose a Title?

© janderson99-HubPages