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Intermediate SEO: Power Keyword Optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 27, 2007 in Intermediate SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Years ago when everyone cared about the keywords meta tag an SEO guru whose name I no longer recall wrote an article about the concept of “power keyword optimization” (my memory is a little fuzzy on the exact wording). You may see references to it as “power keyword sets”, “power keyword phrases”, etc.

All of these terms have since taken on different meanings, mostly with respect to pay-per-click management. In today’s SEO world, a “power keyword” is more of a buzzword than anything else. It’s supposed to be a hot money making item.

In the old days “power keyword optimization” was a method for defining large keyword combinations to reduce the amount of text you included in your keywords meta tag. At the time people were throwing ethical gauntlets at anyone who had a keywords meta tag that looked something like this:

michael martinez,michael martinez seo,michael martinez search engine optimization,michael martinez seo specialist,michael martinez search engine optimization specialist

Every good spammer knew that you could blast your way to search engine success by repeating the same keyword over and over again.

In fact, that still works today except you get caught more quickly. So gone are the days when you see title tags that look like “michael martinez michael martinez michael martinez michael martinez” (although someone may do it in a silly attempt to spite me). Now we care about usability, the first impression we make on searchers, and including compelling calls to action.

Still, since repetition is important, we can learn something from the old school of meta keywords optimizers. These were the people who cleaned up the meta tags and made them look relevant. You can still use these techniques for Ask and Yahoo!, by the way.

So let’s look at our string of Michael Martinez keywords. We could reduce the mish-mash to “seo specialist michael martinez search engine optimization” or “seo michael martinez search engine optimization specialist”. That gives us two expressions to play with. Each expression contains several smaller expressions in it: “seo michael martinez”, “michael martinez seo specialist”, “michael martinez seach engine optimization”, etc.

The idea is to construct an expression that is relevant to several smaller expressions. Think of it is mini-copy within your copy. It was a way of reducing keyword repetition to 3 or fewer occurrences at a time when we feared that more than 3 uses in the keywords meta tag might trip a filter (and in those days filters were not as forgiving as the Darth Vaderish filters we have today — the old filters simply banned your domain, when they worked).

Since repetition is important to establishing relevance, it may seem counterintuitive to reduce the number of uses of a keyword in your copy. But you can use power keyword optimization to write more effective titles, descriptions, and section headings (Hx headings).

You can also use power keyword optimization to write more effective blurbs, ad copy, link anchor text, and bullet points in list structures.

You can also use power keyword optimization to write more concise, to-the-point, effective copy that eliminates wasteful and superfluous words.

Think of reducing your sentences to nouns and verbs. That is where power keyword optimization begins. But you have to create expressions that flow and you want expressions people search for.

There is an entire topic you rarely see discussed in SEO blogs and forums. Call that topic keyword theory. You’ll find most people focus on co-occurence, although most of them probably know less about the topic than you do. Dr. Edel Garcia (known to many in the community as “Orion”), has written extensively about keyword Co-Occurrence. He says it’s important for several reasons, including:

• keyword-brand associations
• brand visibility
• co-citation of products and services
• search volume co-occurrence
• positioning of documents in search results
• analysis of seasonal trends
• design of thematic sites

Co-occurrence is useful in different contexts and I’m not going to cover them all. In brief, think of co-occurrence as representing or identifying the relationship between two words. A word “dog” is more likely to be found in a document containing “cat” than a document containing “phernergan”.

You take a group of documents, find how often “dog” occurs in the same document as any other word, and you can determine which other words are good predictors of the occurrence of “dog”. “Hot dog” is a common American expression. “Carrot dog” is not.

You can use co-occurrence — if you take the time to study it and practice identifying co-related words — to enhance the power of your “power keyword optimization”. That is, if you look at data for the expressions “seo specialist” and “search engine optimization specialist” you’ll find that people search for both and that people include both in their Web pages.

When you decide to optimize for one or the other, you’ll at least have an idea of where people are looking and who your optimizing competition is. But context is very important, both to Co-Occurrence and to keyword optimization. After all, if you’re an SEO firm looking to hire an SEO specialist and you decide to look on the Web, you’ll have to exclude some words and include some words in your queries to filter out the advertisements and job listings other companies have. You want to focus on SEO specialists who may be available for employment.

When you do your keyword research, you’ll often see (for very ambiguous, much-used expressions) numerous related, longer variations on your text. Do your research on “MLB”, for example, and you’ll find there are thousands of related keyword expressions that people use to find very specific things.

There is a correlation between the number of keyword expression variants and the knowledge of the people using the queries. In other words, the more variants you find on keyword expressions the more likely your target audience has generally strong knowledge of the subject. They tend to search for very specialized subsets of data.

You can use that fact to your advantage by writing for collections of related keyword expressions. You’ll emphasize (through repetition) the more common keywords in your copy and you’ll use more rare words than you would if you simply focused on the main keyword expression. Rare words are easier to optimize for. A word like “canine” is more rare than a word like “dog”. Both words can mean the same thing (or they can refer to completely unrelated things).

You refine the context you create for your primary keywords by using more of their variant expressions in your copy. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it. You’ll need to make your copy interesting enough that people want to read it, so simply stuffing thousands of keyword variants into your text is not productive.

You may be thinking you need to optimize for a 4-word expression in order to capture a market. In fact, you may find you need to optimize with 20 or 30 5-to-9-word expressions. Optimzing for that 4-word expression with 20 or 30 longer expressions is where you begin to raise the bar on your SEO copywriting.

When you compose your text with the larger keyword set in mind you liberate your writing and start chasing the so-called “long tail of search” without actually having to create unique content for every expression. Your keyword expressions begin to work together.

In search engine optimization, the more you pool your resources, the more efficient your optimization becomes, the more competitive you become, the greater the advantage you have over people who are still practicing beginner-level optimization.

And a lot of people are stuck at beginner-level optimization. It may be time for you to advance to Intermediate SEO topics and tactics. Think about it.