Keyword and Keyword(s)

[gerardkelley]

Hi all. I've got a little website which some of you have helped me with. According to Google Webmaster Tools, I rank 27th for the phrase "jewelry boxes" and 29th for "jewelry box". That's been the ranking (or close to that) for months. Maybe a year. And that's fine, except I almost never can find my site using "jewelry box". 99% of the time I'm not there. And once in a blue moon, I am. I'm always there for "jewelry boxes". And I've checked at least 15 of Google's IP addresses. And I've looked through 500 listings at each address. I think that more people search for "jewelry box" than "jewelry boxes", so I would like to show up for both. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Dubbya]

I wouldn't rely on Google's webmaster tools for accurate results placements.

If you just want to check google results, head over to cleverstat and download their Free Google Monitor. It doesn't ignore Adsense listings, but it's pretty accurate.

Simple to use and quick too.
Free Monitor for Google - query Google easily. Google Monitor Query website position web ranking software

Or, you can download the free version of WebCEO but it's more complicated and kind of clunky

[chrisJumbo]

We have a similar issue. I try to pepper both phrases through the site, but that generally isn't enough. We've had some success with Articles and are now testing with our new blog.

[Matteo]

I would like to see some sort of study on this, to my mind if someone gets a general idea of something they want to search for they would go plural. Puppies , Jewelry Boxes, Snoods. When they have something specific in mind then they would drop the "s" Spode Jewlery Box. Most people who are shopping (again this is just my opinion based on some years of experience) are looking for options. What kind of jewelry boxes are available?

On the little keyword tracker I use (they are all dubious) Jewlery Boxes Out Searches Jewelry Box 5 to 3.

So I guess Jewelry Box is still important.

[dwrightcwf]

I can suggest a few changes that I think will help.

1. Change the title of your home page so the first word is "jewelry"
2. Your <h1> tag is your company name. This should be something that contains the text or key words you’re targeting.
3. Include the word jewelry more in your content on the page. It is only mentioned 6 times, expand on that a bit.
4. The link at the bottom of the page for "jewelry boxes" goes to a page with the title "Jewelry Box Links" It would be best to change the link to match the title of the page of vice versa.
5. Expand on your image alt tags, make them a little more unique and descriptive. They all read just about the same.
6. On your internal pages you have a huge amount of content in which you hardly mention your key words or phrases. I would load them up a little more, without getting spammy.

You have a nice looking site and from what I see you do great work on your jewelry boxes. Just a few small changes should help but you have some tough competition for those terms.

Dave

[mjtaylor]

WordTracker says estimated daily searches are:

867 jewelry boxes
525 jewelry box

So that would argue for targeting the plural form, starting with the title tag ... which Dave correctly suggests should start with Jewelry. It should be Jewelry Boxes Handmade Wood Boxes if 'Jewelry Boxes' that's the phrase you want to target.

I suggest you use 'handmade' rather than handcrafted as that is a searched term, and as far as I can see 'handcrafted jewelry boxes' is not.

188 wood jewelry boxes135 handmade jewelry boxes

Dave's other suggestions should be helpful with SERPS (though I don't quite agree with #4 but that's just opinion.)

This would also help:

• use your keywords in the first paragraph (very important)
• use them on the page in bold
• in italics
• in a bulleted list
• capitalize the first letters Jewelry Boxes
• link from subpages to the home page using your phrase as anchor text
• make an absolute link on the home page to the home page (yes) using your keyword phrase as the anchor text.
• build inbound links with the phrase (very important)
• name graphics by what they are jewelry-box1.jpg, etc.

I got the keyword figures here: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker

I find that to be a very reliable source of keywords. I don't believe these are dubious at all - on the contrary, when I have compared these results with Adwords and Yahoo campaigns they appear to be reasonably accurate, if not highly so.

Best wishes, MJ

[deepsand]

The problem is that Googles treats the singlular & plural forms as being different.

Yahoo/Overture, on the other, treats them as being logically the same; IMHO, Google's got it wrong.

[incrediblehelp]

Yup the placements listed in Google Webmaster Tools is not always accurate. Remember this is supposedly only an average position from Google. I feel the further down you go, I.e. 3-40-50's in position the more wild the true positions could be on each datacenter.

This mean if you position was #5 then some days maybe #4 and some days on #9 as you go deeper in positions the averages are more extreme.