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3.2 5 keyword portions: choose what's best for each landing page

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When you read the first chapter, you made a great keywords list. Time to put it to use. Open your Excel spreadsheet where you have the keywords. All in one column, you've got 5 major terms (marked green), 30 alternative ones (yellow), and over 60 additional keywords (red).

Now make another table, like the one below. It's a sample list of grouped keywords, for a weddings-related website (I imagined that the company's situated in Sydney, hence the regional markers Australia and Sydney).

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5
wedding ideas wedding website wedding dress wedding gifts wedding planning
wedding ideas flowers wedding tips wedding dresses Australia wedding gifts personalized wedding planes
wedding ideas pictures wedding websites for couples wedding dresses Sydney wedding gifts Australia wedding planning classes
wedding ideas Australia wedding Australia wedding dresses pictures wedding gifts for her wedding planning schedule
wedding ideas shop wedding Sydney wedding gowns wedding gifts for him wedding planning website
wedding ideas forum   wedding dresses wedding gifts to parents wedding planning list
wedding ideas magazine     wedding gifts and favors  
      wedding gifts for wedding party  
      wedding favors  

First of all, make five columns (they are for five landing pages), and put your five main keywords, one into each column. (That's what I did, on the image above you see these words're marked green.)

Now, let's work with your 30 yellow keywords. You need to divide them into 5 groups and put into the columns you have. You don't need to make these portions equal: for each major keyword, take 3 to 9 "yellow" keywords. Try to make each group contain words that are as thematically close to the main word as possible.

I guess you're wondering why you're making five keyword groups for five pages. Here's the explanation:

Why pages come by fives?

Look at your long keywords list. Try to imagine that you have to use ALL of these keywords on just one page.

In short, this is

  • hard to do
  • will look weird to people
  • will appear unnatural to Search Engines

This would be just as stupid, as if for one soup, a cook took all kinds of spices he's got in the restaurant kitchen. Or even just vanilla and red pepper in a bowl of turkey soup. I guess the meal would taste odd to me, and how about you?

My advice is to make landing pages by fives. Make five at the very start to get a good portion of traffic. Then, as soon as you're done with their optimization (both onpage and offpage), you can add more, and start optimizing them, too. Because you add pages step-by-step, your SEO efforts will look natural both to visitors and to Search Engines. And each time, you'll be getting some more traffic.

Of course, that's not absolutely critical. You can make seven or just four landing pages at the very start, and be fine with this. But it's convenient to make them by fives, and that's what I can recommend.

DO IT NOW! Make 5 groups of keywords to create your 5 most important landing pages. On each page, you'll use one major (green) keyword and some supplementary (yellow) ones.

26 comments

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2008-08-23 22:33:01: dickson smith

The structure suggestion is real meat, can't be found elsewhere, at least to me.
Thank you Dan.

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2008-08-25 06:58:32: Tobias Fox

Same to me. The column thing is a really good way to get the keywords.

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2008-09-17 08:35:52: Dan Richmond

Glad to see it's helpful

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2009-01-07 15:29:45: Evon Butler

I'm assuming that these 5 pages would be different versions of the same landing page, Right?

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2009-01-08 11:32:19: Dan Richmond

@Evon Butler
No way - I mean 5 pages for different purposes. Most websites would like to rank high with several pages, and most website have several landing pages in fact - each one has to be optimized. Even if you take this book's website - several pages were optimized for different keywords.

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2009-02-03 21:15:27: Laus Sorensen

I've often been warned against doorway pages.
What's the difference between those and landing pages?

BTW the instructions about sorting the the key phrases are great :-)

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2009-03-09 16:08:53: Willy Rios

Dear Dan, thank you for this great book.

What about if I have a travel site with 15 different destinations and they are all related.. Is it ok if I make these 15 landning pages at once or step by step as you said??

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2009-03-10 10:19:55: Dan Richmond

@Willy Rios
If you have time for all of them, go ahead! :)
5 was just for convenience.
Thanks for joining the SIP family!

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2009-06-12 12:56:58: Rich Brodsky

Is it important not to repeat ANY keywords across these pages? Like for the home page, I feel like I want to include some keywords from the sub-pages. Is this a bad idea?

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2009-09-08 17:24:19: george githinji

thanks for such great insight,i actually had to stop reading to digest the information.Brilliant

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2009-10-22 16:44:34: Paul Dunn

Love the info... How about when the site format is a blog where every keyword rich post lands on the front page? Does that water down the effectiveness of the keywords?

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2009-10-23 03:18:57: Watch Naruto Online

landing page for affiliate program.
i never use it for another way of make money online.

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2009-10-26 06:33:34: Dan Richmond

@Paul Dunn

Shouldn't have any bad effect. The first days when you place a new blog posting, you will have two pages ranking: the main page and the page where the posting itself sits. Then only the page with the posting.

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2009-12-08 20:04:27: Ken Taylor

This is great! I like your way of building up under the five main KW's. I'm realizing that I'm not utilizing a lot of potential KW fodder. I've been just focusing on the main KW's with no more than 1 or 2 extras.

As always, looking forward to the next chapter as if it were a TV drama :)

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2010-01-01 12:21:55: Paul Watchorn

That was a really good lesson

About landing pages and doorway pages, as I understand it the main difference is that when someone lands on a doorway page, it throws you right to another address.

What I don't get,(and I know we are going a little of subject here), when you type www.norton.com into the browser,how does it manage to fire you right to http://shop.symantecstore.com/store/ blah blah blah (a page rank 6 page) without getting into trouble with Google?

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2010-01-05 11:04:13: Dan Richmond

@Paul Watchorn

norton.com is not ranking in Google, while the symantec-related domains do. This redirect is used for only one purpose: if a person types in www.norton.com in the browser's address bar, they will be directed to the right page. No SEO purpose, obviously.

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2010-02-06 10:33:24: Thomas Walsh

I have learned quite a bit thus far. However, I remain confused as to where these keywords are placed in the page. Unless I skipped over something, or had a senior moment, there has been no mention where to put the keywords.

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2010-02-25 08:20:59: Martin Buzz

Hy I have the same dubit as Laus Sorensen:

I've often been warned against doorway pages.
What's the difference between those and landing pages?

I hope is not a silly question

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2010-02-26 11:41:46: Dan Richmond

@Martin Buzz

A doorway page is created only to rank high and then redirect visitors to another page.
A landing page is created first and foremost to show some content to visitors.

Wikipedia has pretty good articles about both:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page

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2010-03-17 18:03:14: mike young

When you create these landing pages should the homepage link back to the landing page again or the original index page?

For example when you land on a landing page the logos I have at the top take me to my original page, should these be changed to stay on this landing page?

Reading this is more addictive than Home and Away!




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2010-03-19 13:06:26: Dan Richmond

When you create these landing pages should the homepage link back to the landing page again or the original index page?

Obviously links are created to lead to certain pages. A person won't click your Homepage link unless they want to check out the homepage. And there should be a way to get to the homepage :)

Banners placed on each page of a site normally lead to the same page. I don't think there's a point making something clickable if it doesn't react.

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2010-03-30 15:20:20: Gordon kirby

make this printable, my eyes sting
other wise so far so good

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2010-06-18 10:23:23: jagadesan ganesan

Dear Dan,

We have a single product. It is an outlook email search tool. It has only one function - search outlook. We understand that each landing page corresponds to a unique externally click-able entry point. For our scenario, we can think of a search engine result and PPC, as entry points. On the other hand we can artificially create about 5 groups of keywords, as per your suggestion for pluralistic landing pages. But we are unable to conceive enternally click-able entry points for those. How do we reconcile? Please suggest.

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2010-06-20 00:51:07: vinayak patil

Hello Dan,
Thats a really good artile.I came across it 1st time.I like the way you explain things.Keep up good work.

Regards
Vinayak

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2010-08-13 02:15:27: Victor Cazares

I'm confused about where the home page fits into this chart. Are we not suppose to initially optimize our site by starting on the home page? Or are you considering one the landing pages in the chart to be the home page?

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2010-09-02 06:46:22: Ivo Valentinov

I think site with five pages will be very good. Not too much, not too less. It is practical. ;)

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