Ranking for two highly competitive keyword specific terms

[teigeman]

Hi,

This one is tough, and I hope that the minds here can help me understand my options.

Our company has been doing SEO since the advent of the Internet, and today we rank extremely well for most of our key phrases and search terms. Which is good.

BUT... (and you knew there was a but...)

One key phrase in particular gives us no end of pain and suffering. It is a variation on a popular phrase used in searching for products of our type.

As an example:

we rank very highly for "chocolate cookies" but are losing ground quickly for "mocha cookies" due to competitors who are optimizing specifically for that phrase and it's keywords.

Historically, we have dominated the results (through good, honest SEO - white paper distribution, PRs, industry articles, quality backlinks, and most of all great relative content) but here's the rub:

Some in our industry search for "chocolate cookies", maybe even most. But increasingly, our competition is advertising and optimizing heavily for "mocha cookies", in an attempt to increase the awareness of "mocha" vs. "chocolate" as the qualifying (and most popular) search term.

How do we optimize for "mocha cookies" without UNdoing our optimization for "chocolate cookies". This query is with respect to Title and Meta tags, keywords, etc.

The last thing we want to do is lose ground under "chocolate cookies" in our attempt to optimize for the up-and-coming phrase "mocha cookies".

I hope this triggered your creative sweet tooth, because this problem is one tough cookie!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

ddb

[mjtaylor]

One of the current thoughts is that text near a link now has more weight, so anchor text is less critical and contextual content more so. I am not sure that the algo has changed in that regard, but I do believe that context is important, and I do believe that contextual links are gaining weight and anchor text in navigation links is, perhaps, declining.

That said, I would not necessarily change any thing in terms of meta tags or title, but I would add some contextual links with mocha in it *and* near it on the home page to the home page and from other pages on the site.

I have found that adjusting my anchor text within navigation to include mocha, on some pages can be helpful without harming my chocolate SERPs.

It's hard to really make suggestions without seeing your site and keywords, but you could link back the home page from a strong, relevant internal page with a phrase such as "Do you love chocolate with mocha?"

Of course, you could also add more mocha content - a new page on mocha or some blog posts? And get some external links with Mocha in the anchor text ... getting new links for Mocha should not dilute your chocolate placement.

I have an SEO web design site and have found that adding keyword targets doesn't dilute my current placement - especially when done with inbound links.

Hope that helps ...

MJ

[chrisJumbo]

We are dealing with something similar. And mjtaylor has some great tips. Creative writing is certainly a great way to get the additional keywords without being "spammy" or making your page seem unnatural.

I would think you could create an additional page that focuses on "mocha" cookies. And you may find (especially, if your site has been around a while) that your competitors will crumble.

And then they will be saying, "Nuts!" instead of you.

Chris Duncan

[RegDCP]

Originally Posted by teigeman

Hi,

This one is tough, and I hope that the minds here can help me understand my options.

Our company has been doing SEO since the advent of the Internet, and today we rank extremely well for most of our key phrases and search terms. Which is good.

BUT... (and you knew there was a but...)

One key phrase in particular gives us no end of pain and suffering. It is a variation on a popular phrase used in searching for products of our type.

As an example:

we rank very highly for "chocolate cookies" but are losing ground quickly for "mocha cookies" due to competitors who are optimizing specifically for that phrase and it's keywords.

Historically, we have dominated the results (through good, honest SEO - white paper distribution, PRs, industry articles, quality backlinks, and most of all great relative content) but here's the rub:

Some in our industry search for "chocolate cookies", maybe even most. But increasingly, our competition is advertising and optimizing heavily for "mocha cookies", in an attempt to increase the awareness of "mocha" vs. "chocolate" as the qualifying (and most popular) search term.

How do we optimize for "mocha cookies" without UNdoing our optimization for "chocolate cookies". This query is with respect to Title and Meta tags, keywords, etc.

The last thing we want to do is lose ground under "chocolate cookies" in our attempt to optimize for the up-and-coming phrase "mocha cookies".

I hope this triggered your creative sweet tooth, because this problem is one tough cookie!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

ddb

I would do a new page for mocha cookies.
Doing this would not affect your current standings for chocolate cookies.

There are only about 900k pages showing for a search in Google so it should not be too hard to place well.

Reg

[edhan]

Yes. I do agree with RegDCP about doing a different page about mocha cookies instead of trying to optimize the current page. That way, you will be able to focus individual keywords for SEO. I do believe that having quality content writeup will soon place you in a better ranking position for both search terms.

[incrediblehelp]

Sounds like your home page ranks for your main keyword. Why not rank a sub-page for "mocha cookies" as suggested above?

[idansh]

Thats what I did, I wrote a 300 words small article on the top of my page that explains about the website and used the relevant keywords, it is a well knows technique that works !
You can see it on the first page on my website here

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by idansh

Thats what I did, I wrote a 300 words small article on the top of my page that explains about the website and used the relevant keywords, it is a well knows technique that works !
You can see it on the first page on my website here

First it looks to me as you are spamming:

<meta name="Subject" content="Free online Website Position Checker Tool for checking your Page Rank and website position in Google Yahoo and MSN" />

And second, for which term are you ranking so high? Or are you trying to promote your tool here?

[ctabuk]

There are times when doing SEO posts can turn your hair white overnight.

We try to give decent advice,but - this is the page top on Google for that search term.

Yes for the advice on a new page, and you should soon topple this
Summary Results for www.chilipaper.com/FRecipes...

Site Title: Mocha CookiesSite URL: http://www.chilipaper.com/FRecipes/F...okies.htmDate: June 7, 2007, 5:48 amOverall Rating: 8/10DetailsRatingSummaryLink Check10/10Broken links: 0HTML Check8/10HTML Errors: 0, warnings: 72Load Time Check9/10Load Time: 10.48 secondsMeta Tag Check4/10Meta Tag Warnings: 2Spell Check9/10Possible Misspellings: 5Keyword Check8/10Total words: 138Sponsor Free Web Site Monitoring - Make sure your web site is available 24/7. Link Popularity
GoogleHotBotAllTheWebAltaVistaLycosMSNAOLLink Popularity004141000

[teigeman]

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I should have clarified that 'chocolate cookies' and 'mocha cookies' are just stylized examples of similar keyword phrases. We are actually in a highly competitive (okay, cutthroat) software/services segment.

That said, there is great information here, and thanks again to all who responded.

tm

[Ne0]

Ah... Glad you cleared that up

I think I work for one of your bigger competitors

good info in the thread though....

.02

[xtopher]

I suggest deep linking. Create new page(s) for your keyword target and do the Article rounds (and other succesful SEO techniques you know) with contextual text/achor text. Probably best to do this on as many new keywords as you can which will add some good PR to those internal pages. Of course if you have your site structure set correctly, you can pass off some of that PR to your index page too. (Im sure you can nofollow some pages in your site that arent really worth spidering.)
Therefore you should end up with your index and internal pages, with loads of IBL`s and SEO techniques pointing at those individual pages.
Its great if you have the associated content for the new pages too and probably Google will like the fact you RSS the new content from those pages. However, as its been proved, having the right links from the right sites is the real deal.......pages with discernable or zero content will rank!
I think you will be surprised how little competitors SEO their sites, so a little effort should see you do well.

But im no SEO expert. I just found the above works for me. If I were making big money out of it I wouldnt be hanging around forums. I`d be out in my Ferrari.

[kauzy]

I suggest you could create an additional page that focuses on "mocha" cookies and build IBL's for it.