LooseSuits

I have always liked the approach of finding a lot of good keywords with very little competition. If you only have two options then you go for "Competition", otherwise you go for "Demand" a lot of other ones where your chances of making it to the top are greater.

I think it's more important to have a couple of keywords that lead to your site, than to worry with getting a bunch from the start. Your content is more important, I think; the rest will follow, as they say.

I agree. I've never thought about utilizing keywords into my site once, and yet google still seems to bring in hundreds

I agree with Leliathomas, concentrate on your site, concentrate on providing a quality service that people will promote in other ways and search engine rankings will either follow, or will be negligible.

But, to answer your question, farming the tail, or going after the few people that search for longer, more detailed (less competitive) keyword combinations is best. These people convert better, purchase more, contact, comment, etc. and its easier to get to the top.

It's easier if you toss out some examples. For instance, lots of competition and demand for something like:

shoes

less competition and still plenty of demand for:

running shoes

But shoes is inherently part of running shoes. Target the combo, you target each independently. So when considering terms to optimize a page for, combo up the ones you're aiming at.

zkatkin couldn't have said it better. "Long tail" keywords continue to bring in better converting visitors. You numbers will be down, but who really cares. It's all about conversions.

Danny, great to see you hear buddy, it's not often someone can post a topic about SEO and have the legend Danny Sullivan personally answer their question, especially without an invoice ;)

Hi everybody,

Actually, I have some doubt about S.E.O. Many company said that they could do some techniques to help us improve the highlight keyword in search engine (SE). However, this depends a lot on those kinds of SE. Google has its own technology, Yahoo has another one and MSN uses a different one. There is not guarantee that we could achieve that purpose.

I totally agree with leliathomas' point. I often pay the most attention to my content and my design in order to satisfy the visitors' needs, keep them return and encourage them introduce my site.

I may start a topic, which I will discuss deeply for this issue, on my personal blog

I was talking to a few of my friends in SEO.. most of them said it's all about the backlinks which I wrote an article About SEO here =)

There's no one SEO technique that will guarantee you top results. Keyword optimization is one of the methods that helps, though. I am definitely all for optimizing more specialized keywords, such as "silver jewelery" as opposed to merely jewelery. You'll not only find it easier to rank higher in the search engines, but you'll get more specialized (and therefore, more interested) traffic to your site.

With regard to the different SE's, yes, they do have different technologies, but they're not really contradictory. Usually, when you optimize a site with good keywords, links, etc., you'll do well across the board.

p.s. If that's actually Danny Sullivan responding, I might have a heart attack.

THE Danny Sullivan? Whoah.

SEO can be overrated at times - surfing the net and searching for SEO solutions are like thumbing through a book of singles classifieds - this guru sells you this for a limited time only, that guru sells you that for a limited time only ... and each of these gurus all promote TOP SECRET, NEVER SEEN BEFORE tricks and techniques, in nice little ebooks you can get if you input your email address. I've been frustrated with this process of learning more - and it's sad, since SEO is still an important part of the web.

Personally I don't like searching for keywords and looking for ways to insert them into my articles - I believe writing well and presenting ideas in a clear, easy-to-understand manner works more wonders than SEO can ever do.

That being said, I edit Wordpress's permalink structure, add in a sitemap and probably will continue to do so if it increases ease of use of my blog.

Google is constantly improving: soon SEO will probably be HRO ... Human Readibility Optimization.

And that would rock. =P