How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page

January 19th, 2009 | by Court | Published in SEO | 65 Comments

The more I dig in mentally to the world of making money with the internet, the more I realize that there are a lot of different ways to go about it. When I first started making money online, I would create simple content sites that got 99% of their traffic on the homepage. For some reason I was living under the misconception that home pages could rank better than other pages. I now know that this isn’t true in fact I have quite a few post pages that bring more search traffic than their corresponding home pages.

Almost all of my sites make more at the post level than they do on the home pages and this is because I understand how to write posts that target keywords. This is a basic process that a lot of you probably already understand, but I wanted to cover it so that everyone would know that they aren’t missing anything.

Here’s a simple step-by-step of how to do this:

Make sure that the keyword is used in the title of your post.
Make sure that the keyword appears in the HTML title of the post page. This should happen automatically if you’re using WordPress or Blogger.
Make sure that the keyword appears a few times within the text of the post itself. This should be fairly easy to do if you write posts that are large. I would recommend going with a post that’s at least 300 words and I prefer to make them a lot larger. Most of my post pages that rank are at least 500 words and many of them are over 1,000. I like to make sure that these pages are meaty and provide a lot of useful information.
Use the keyword as a tag or label on the post. This helps you to get the keyword on the post page one more time and also creates an extra page within your site. The tag page not only covers the topic but links to the post that you’re targeting the keyword with.

A lot of you are probably wondering how many times you can use a keyword within a post and get away with it. There’s no simple answer to this because it depends on how long your post is. If you write a 2,000 word post it would be quite natural to use your keyword like 10 times. If you’re only writing posts that are 300 words, you could probably only use it twice.

The bottom line is that you don’t need to use your keyword 500 times to get ranked and based on what I’ve seen I can tell you that most people seem to overuse their keyword thinking that it’s the only way that they can get ranked. I honestly haven’t found this to be beneficial as rankings are influenced a lot more by the links pointing at a page than they are by the text on the page.

What most people are missing in this game is that in order to get a post page to rank, it has to be linked to. Most people understand this concept if they’re working on their home page and simply don’t realize that with a post page, the same concept applies.

Based on what I’ve seen, Google doesn’t really discriminate because of the location (the URL) of a page, in fact in many cases I have seen my posts outrank home pages when both pages are going after the same keyword. This has to do with the fact that the posts have better links or a higher quantity of links. This generally happens because the post does a better job of solving the searchers problem which means the post gets linked to more often and by better sites.

A huge advantage to going after keywords this way is that you can add to the traffic and income of any site by creating a keyword targeted post. As long as you haven’t used every single keyword in your niche you still have upside.