What Are Website Target Keywords?

Previously, we discussed that SEO optimization focuses on individual web pages. Every website has its own set of carrying keywords, which are divided into target keywords and long-tail keywords. Today, we will focus on target keywords.\n

Definition of Target Keywords

Target keywords refer to the "main" keywords determined for a website after analyzing industry keywords. In simple terms, these are the keywords that the target customers of the website's products or services might use to search. For example, for an automotive website, "automobile" and "car price quotes" would be target keywords.

Characteristics of Target Keywords

1. Target keywords are generally used as the titles for the homepage and navigation pages.
2. They usually consist of 2-4 characters, forming a word or phrase, and are mostly nouns.
3. Target keywords have a stable number of daily searches in search engines.
4. Users searching for target keywords often have a demand for the website's products and services or are interested in the website's content.
5. Target keywords must be set around the website's products and services, and the main content of the website should revolve around these keywords.
6. The traffic of small to medium-sized websites can generally be estimated based on the ranking of target keywords, but this does not apply to large websites.
7. When users search for target keywords on Baidu, the results are mostly the website's homepage or secondary directory pages.

Selecting Target Keywords

To optimize target keywords, you must first determine them. How should a website determine its target keywords? Here is a detailed step-by-step guide:

1. Search for the main industry keywords, collect the top 10 ranking websites for each, and then collect the target keywords from each of those websites. After analysis, you will find that most of these keywords overlap. These overlapping keywords are the target keywords you are looking for.
2. Once you have the keywords, do not use them immediately. List them in a table and query the search index and indexing volume for each keyword. You can use official tools like Baidu Index or third-party tools like Aizhan or Zhanzhang Tool. After compiling the statistics into a table, sort all the keywords. Generally, keywords with higher search indices and indexing volumes are more difficult to optimize.
3. After comparing the detailed data, finally determine the target keywords based on your own development plan and estimate the optimization time and traffic potential for the desired keywords. For example, "furniture" and "solid wood furniture" might both be target keywords, but the optimization difficulty will differ. After analysis and comparison, you can determine the target keywords and set them in combination. It is important to note the title tag format: Keyword1_Keyword2_Keyword3-Company Name, or for brand-focused companies: Company Name-Keyword1_Keyword2_Keyword3. The title should not exceed 30 characters, as exceeding this limit will negatively affect display performance.

Optimizing Target Keywords

Target keywords are more difficult to optimize compared to long-tail keywords, but they have unique advantages. So, how should you optimize target keywords? Here are several key points:

1. Website Structure: Target keywords are generally optimized on the homepage. As the center of the entire website, the classification structure is crucial. The overall website structure should be clearly built around the homepage. For instance, a furniture website should not have an entertainment news section.
2. Code Structure: Search engines crawl page code. If your page code is cluttered or loops trap the spider, achieving a good ranking will be impossible.
3. Server: Search engines are increasingly valuing access speed. If your website's server frequently encounters issues or has a long response time, it will result in a poor user experience.
4. Content Layout: In addition to structuring the website around target keywords, the daily content generated must also expand around these keywords. Appropriate internal links should also point to the target keywords.
5. External Links: As mentioned before, external links are important. Beyond quantity, relevance is crucial. Do not focus solely on the number of external links while ignoring their relevance, as this can be counterproductive.
6. Basic Elements: These include 404 pages, URL redirection, robots.txt specifications, determination of the preferred domain, H1 tags, etc. We will analyze and introduce these specific operation methods in subsequent SEO tutorials, so stay tuned!

Dong Ming, SEO Column Mentor at XiaoZ Blog. WeChat: wx5785370, SEO Group: 68973910.