SEO Question....

Hi Guys,

Sorry if i have doubled up on this post, but the first one didn't seem to appear on the forum.

I was wondering for a blog, if you have optimized the home page around a particular keyword phrase that you are targeting. eg. "Dog Training"...this is the primary keyword phrase.

So this means "Dog Training" is in the title of the home page, in the meta tags and description of the index page.

So from here you build backlinks around the anchor text "Dog Training" with a link back to your homepage...

But what if you create a post titled"Dog Training", this will create a whole separate page on your site with the same keywords that you have optimized the homepage for....so then the search engines will rank that page as the keywords "Dog Training" as well....

So will this confuse the search engines as to which page on your site is trying to rank for the keywords "Dog Training"???

Also when building backlinks using the main keywords as anchor text, "Dog Training", should that link back to the index page of the site, or that post page?

Do you see my confusion here?

Also when optimizing the homepage for the main targeted keyword phrase, is there any other place i should be putting those keywords "eg. "Dog training" on the page? (Seeing as though it's a blog it's not like the keywords"Dog Training" can appear in every post in the content as each post will be centred around different longtail keywords.)

Any advice would be great...thanks.

If you are doing a site on dog training then it would be a great idea to somehow add those keyword phrased into your domain first.

For Example: getdogtrainingadvice.com or simpledogtrainingadvice.com or dogtraining.com if it is available.

Next it would be a good idea to get links pointing to the main index page with anchor text to start getting rankings.

However, Google ranks pages or posts (same thing) not the whole site together in its whole.

Understand.

Then you should start to do keyword research to find long tail keyword phrases for each post or page to optimize separately for and start getting links in to each individual post or page for that long tail keyword phrase.

I hope this helps.

You want all your pages to rank not just the index hope this helps.:)

Hi bornstein75,

Yeah. You're right. Put your main keyword on your title tag, description and in the content (rule of thumb is once every 300 words). But don't oversell your keywords. Avoid keyword stuffing.

Remember to have variations in your anchor text. It's not going to look natural if all links are pointing back to your homepage with "dog training".

It's ok to write a post with "dog training" for the keywords. You might even get a double listing for doing that. But you might wanna take Elizabeth's advice and find some long tail keywords for dog training and target those long-tails in your articles. Your homepage will contain your main keyword and your articles are going to be your secondary keywords.

When backlinking, don't point everything to your homepage. Make sure to point some links to your inside pages as well using the keywords in your articles as anchor text.

Hope this helps.

Raymond

Great advice already!

For optimization, see my checklist & tutorial here: Web Page Optimization

Raymond is right about potential double listings. Google will show two listings per domain for any given search. The way to achieve this is to have two "pages" (that can means posts with a blog) that are optimized for the same keyword phrase - or close, even.

Here is an example of a double listing for a BABB series I did awhile back, not a keyword phrase but a good visual example of a double listing:

http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.co...le-listing.jpg

You can watch this awesome video by Andy Jenkins from StomperNet on how to achieve double listings.

http://www.stompernet.net/goingnatural2/