Keywords are an important part of SEO and are one of the keys to gaining traffic through the search engines. However, many web site owners try to over do the use of keywords, particularly on their home page.

One of the misconceptions in SEO is that your home page should be optimized for all your keywords. Search engines will only display one site in the results for any search term used. You could have ten pages that rank highly, but only the one that best matches the search term will be displayed.

If you have a landing page for a particular set of keywords, their is a real danger that your home page will outrank that landing page thus undoing all the work done. This may result in a loss of sales or conversions because the searcher is not immediately finding what they are looking for.

For sites using landing pages for particular keyword sets, you are better off not optimizing for those keywords on your homepages. What should you optimize on your homepage? Every site is different however your homepage is the one page that should be optimized for your business name and your brand.

This is not to say that other pages cannot be optimized for similar keyword sets. You just need to be careful that you don’t outrank yourself and leave your landing page without any traffic. Support pages that are optimized for similar keywords need to have clear links back to your landing page – this obviously is where you want your traffic (else why have a landing page).

Suffocating keywords is a mistake that many web owners make. Have a clear plan and optimize keywords on pages that need optimizing. Avoid the mistake of optimizing for the same keywords on every page within your site – SEO is all about promoting your most appropriate pages within the search engines to maximize the return on your work. Let your keywords breathe and they will work for you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 3:43 am and is filed under SEO, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.