Do you think it's good practice to put keywords/key-phrases on footer of every page of my website? Has anyone experience any benefits or bad experience regarding this practice?
Also, how many keywords or key-phrases are deemed as acceptable on footer of every page? Reason i'm asking is that, I am seeing this practice present on most websites that are ranked high on Google.
Last edited by deepsand; 10-09-2011 at 04:24 PM. Reason: merged consecutive & related posts
I've never seen a page ranking well for a keyword because it is in the footer.Originally Posted by mesmero
The footer is typically the same site wide. Does this mean you want to target the same keyword with each page of your site?
I do see internal (and external) links in footers. WP blogs have the link in the footer that links back to the homepage. And some people put links to their most important pages/posts in the footer. This provides a site wide anchor text link to their most important pages. Is this what you're talking about?
Last edited by Sweet Tooth #3; 10-09-2011 at 08:45 PM.
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Just the keywords in the footer with no linking are just spammy... but if you do some smart internal linking and freaquent blog posting on your site, you can boost the size of your your site as well as boost some of your key interior pages for important keywords.
Can you give some examples of the sites that are ranking on google and using this practice. It could be benificial to link to specific landing pages with specific keywords to help them rank in their own right.
Is this what you mean?
If you are doing a custom footer for each page it makes sense. This is where you put synonyms of words that you couldn't fit naturally in the body copy. Will Google penalize you for it? That depends. Google has tools for spotting these things automatically. And by penalize I mean de-list your indexed pages. So at one point you could get the "you're violating our guidelines so where de-listing the offending pages for 30 days."
Then you'll need to fix it and ask for a re-inclusion request. Not the end of the world, and these things usually go right back to normal after they review your fix.
But is it effective? You bet. That's why you can get penalized for it. You don't get penalized for stuff that is ineffective. Ineffective stuff doesn't clog up their SERPs with low quality pages.
Placing keywords on the footer of every page is not going to do you much good...maybe some good but not much. Depending on how it is implemented, Google may penalize you for it. I know we are all looking for that edge but the best thing to do is practice white hat SEO. Google continues with their algorithm tweaks and this may become an issue down the road, even though it may not be today. Think long term and you will be doing yourself a huge favor.
Actually it can help quite a bit. Depends on the relevancy to the page and the terms you use. Now if your page is about horse grooming, putting the words "Horse Grooming", "Grooming for Horses" and "Horses Grooming" won't help much as you probably already use the words thought the content and in your title. However "equestrian grooming", "equestrian coat care" and "equine teeth cleaning" may be helpful for catching long tail searches as you probably aren't going to write your article using every synonym for horse available. This helps round out the content.
Google may get pissy abouttit from time to time but I'd hardly call it "black hat". Heck just call them "tags" or a "summary". Pretty much the same concept but apparently tags are "cool" while "keywords" aren't. Just like how "fames'" are ridiculed as being so 90's but "iFrames" are hipster web 2.0.
What is it with those who see every failure to succeed as being the result of a "penalty?"
Not getting more than you've earned is not a penalty.
Last edited by deepsand; 10-11-2011 at 03:32 AM. Reason: grammar
We use keywords in the footer. We'll often use a handful of major keywords along with the company contact info and tagline. Hopefully the tagline might even use some of the better keywords. We'll also use town names if the site is targeted to a local audience. I don't think it's spammy - we don't just put a bunch of keywords in a list. I've seen that lots of times. But rather we make a small informational block that sums up the site and provides contact info.
I'd like to see Mesmero chime back in and be more specific about his question. I see Clay's point about putting synonyms in the footer.
But ranking high for competitive terms requires you to have the term in the title tag as well as having it mentioned several times in the article. The above mentioned practice might help for some long tail terms, but not for competitive ones.
The OP mentioned sites that are "Ranking high on Google."
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