How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is in the choice of keywords for a new site, specifically secondary keywords.. These are the words or phrases that you use when writing your content to help theme the page so that the search engines know what your page is about. These secondary keywords also help to bring in more traffic, because they add more depth to your page, meaning that your page is found for a lot more phrases than just the primary phrase you page is built around.

Let's look at an example.

Suppose you were building a niche site on hemorrhoids.

One of your main pages is likely to be about treating hemorrhoids. Let's use "hemorrhoid treatment" as our primary keyword phrase for this page (it has high searches, but also high competition, so secondaries are going to be working hard to get this page ranking high for related phrases).

So how do you find secondary keywords for use on this page? Surely there cant be many possible secondaries?

Well, you have a few options for finding secondaries. There is a paid service called Thememaster which a lot of marketers use for this purpose (search Google for this one if you are interested - I have not used it, so cannot recommend it). However, my own favourite method is using Keyword Results Analyzer. If you own it, you have all you need to find those secondaries.

I carried out research at Wordtracker for this niche, and imported them into KRA. One of the strengths of KRA is the filtering and reporting features. To find secondary keywords, I simply filter the phrases that contain the word "treat". This will pull out all phrases containing treat, treatment etc. Since all phrases in my database are related to hemorrhoids, all phrases returned will be related to treating this condition.

KRA gives me 61 phrases that are searched for at the search engines related to hemorrhoid treatment. Now the difficulty is not how to find secondaries, it is how to choose from 61 related phrases (which is obviously too many for a single page).

Here are the 61 phrases:

Alternative Treatments Hemorrhoids
Best Hemorrhoid Treatment
Chiropractic Hemorrhoid Treatment
Cure Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemmoroids
External Hemorrhoid Treatment
Haemmaroid Treatment
Haemorrhoids Treatment
Haemorroid Treatment
Hemarroid Treatment
Hemorhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Cures And Treatments
Hemorrhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Home Treatments
Hemorrhoid Internal Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treat Holistic Herbal
Hemorrhoid Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Infrared Coagulation
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Micro Current
Hemorrhoid Treatment Cure
Hemorrhoid Treatment Drugs
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids Common Cure For Piles
Hemorrhoid Treatment In Pregnancy
Hemorrhoid Treatment Phoenix Az
Hemorrhoid Treatments
Hemorrhoid Treatments Hemorroids
Hemorrhoidal Polyps Treatment
Hemorrhoidal Treatments
Hemorrhoidectomy Treatment
Hemorrhoids Banding Surgical Treatment
Hemorrhoids External Treatment
Hemorrhoids Symptoms Causes And Treatments
Hemorrhoids Treatment
Hemorrhoids Treatment Care
Hemorrhoids Treatment Cure Hemorr
Hemorrhoids Treatment Of
Hemorrhoids Treatment Review
Hemorrihoid Treatment
Home Hemorrhoidal Treatments
How To Treat Hemorrhoids
Internal Bleeding Hemorrhoids Hemorrhoid Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Herbs Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Treatment
Irc Hemorrhoid Treatment
Kansas City Hemorrhoid Treatment
Laser Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Med Treatment Hemorrhoid
Natural Hemorrhoid Treatment
Natural Treatment Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Pph Hemorrhoid Treatment
Treat Hemorrhoids What To Eat
Treating Haemmeroids
Treating Hemorrhoids
Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Treatment Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Type Of Doctor To Treat Hemorrhoids

If you used all of these phrases as they are, you would not only have a very large page, but you would have a very high density of certain words like treatment, treating. We obviously have to be very careful about not using a word too many times, so one of the useful features built into KRA is its unique keyword list report. This report shows you all of the unique words that make up a set of phrases. Here are the unique words that make up the above phrases:

alternative
az
banding
best
bleeding
Care
causes
chiropractic
city
coagulation
common
cure
cures
current
doctor
drugs
during
eat
external
haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemoids
hemorhoid
hemorr
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoidal
hemorrhoidectomy
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids
herbal
herbs
holistic
home
how
infrared
internal
irc
kansas
Laser
med
micro
natural
phoenix
piles
polyps
pph
preganancy
pregnancy
review
surgical
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments
type

What this list gives you is a set of keywords that you can use in your content where they make sense. By adding these words to your page, you can theme your page so that it matches lots of frequently searched for phrases.

For example, if you used these words:

treat
treating
treatment
treatments

on your page, you would have the chance to rank in Google for "treat hemorrhoids", "treating hemorrhoids", "hemorrhoid treatment" & "hemorrhoid treatments".

By also using Mispelled variations of hemorrhoids highlighted in this list:

haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemorhoid
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids

together with the above treatment words, you can expect to be found for search phrases containing every combination of the mispellings when searched with a treatment phrase. That's 48 different search phrases that your page could be found for.

Now, the above example is one I don't necessarily recommend you follow, since all those mispellings may make your page read very badly. But you get the idea.

Perhaps a better use of this type of unique keyword list would be to target the treatment/cure style keywords.

This would not look unnatural:

alternative
Care
cure
cures
doctor
drugs
herbal
herbs
holistic
Laser
med
natural
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments

Add these into your content, together with a couple of alternative spellings, and you can have a page that can potentially rank well for large numbers of hemorrhoid treatment related phrases.

Imagine if you were a search engines, and after analysing your page for theme, you found the above words (and one or two spellings of hemorrhoid).

Would you have any difficulty deciding which theme the page was about?

About the Author

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