SEO » Search engine optmization » New methods to research keywords

How to research keywords and structure

Our SEO experts Philippines know that SEO has changed in a big way over the past years, how about YOU? You’ve probably heard alot about the changes Google has made to their algorithm in how it looks at anchor text and on-page factors that can trigger an over-optimization penalty But did you know that keyword research and ideal site structure in general has changed too? Well, it has.

Fortunately I’m going to tell you exactly how it has changed so you can adjust your own sites immediately and do things correctly for any future sites that you may build.

So what has changed with keyword research site structures?

The biggest change relating to how we do keyword research and then implement that on our site is Google’s increased interest in “topical” pages and their decreased interest in “keyword” pages. Let me explain what I mean by “topical” pages and “keyword” pages.

Ever since Google came into existence back in the 90’s, they have largely been keyword focused. In other words, if someone did a search for “old time radio” they looked for pages that were the most focused on the keyword “old time radio.” If they found a page about “radio” from an expert on radio, which mentioned “old time radio” (even if that page was very popular and authoritative) they might rank it in the top 50 or so, but it would not rank nearly as well as a page that was specifically targeting “old time radio.”

So, if you had that exact phrase in the title tag of your page and in the URL of your page and a few times in the content of your page, and the sites that link to that page also used that keyword as the text to link to you, then there was a pretty good chance that you were going to rank well in Google for that phrase.

Now Google wants to rank topical pages and this seems to be more than just a test. They are heavily leaning this way, so we had better wrap our minds around this and start doing it.

What is a “topical page?”

A topical page is one that focuses on a topic, rather than a keyword. For instance, if I have a site about home improvement and I want to rank for “bathroom remodeling ideas” in the past I would create a page that focused on that exact keyword and I would work to get that page ranked for that keyword. With a topical page I would create a more authoritative page that covers the entire “bathroom remodel” topic.

So that page would ideally contain the keyword “bathroom remodeling ideas” and also “cheap ways to remodel your bathroom” and several other long-tail phrases that fall under the “bathroom remodeling” topic.

So what you’re effectively doing is creating “bigger” more authoritative pages on your site, which cover multiple long-tail phrases. The primary keyword for these topical pages is naturally going to be a more competitive phrase, but your goal is not to get ranked for that main topic (at least not right away). Your goal is to get that one page ranked for the multiple long-tail phrases!

This goes along the same lines of Google wanting to rank branded sites over unbranded sites. They are very much interested in completely changing the future of search in a way that heavily favors brands and topics rather than pages and keywords.

With all of that being said, be sure to start creating topical pages on any new sites that you create and put this info into action now for your current sites where possible.

This does NOT mean that old, non-topical pages/posts are bad for the health of your site. It just means those keyword based pages/posts have less of a chance to rank than if you had topical pages. So if you haven’t been doing this on your current sites, your best best might be to simply create new topical pages while leaving your old pages/posts as-is, our SEO experts Philippines will help you with your conversion rate optimization services.