General page optimization (keyword phrases)

Hello Everyone,

I'm sure this has been asked before but I can't find it by searching. When checking/optimizing your pages for multiple word phrases is it generally best to base it on "exact" or non-exact matching? There are vast differences depending on which method you use. Using exact matching my pages fall within generally acceptable limits but when using non-exact matching it seems that I have way too many occurances of part of my keyword phrases. Any help/recomendations would be greatly appreciated.

Lou

Hello Lou,From what I have read and noticed, the best strategy is to take on the small battles.
For example, a search for keyword "mentoring" yields 2,490,000 results, but a search for
"advance mentoring" yields only 517,000 results. So the more specific your keywords, or longer keyhrases you
choose as keywords, the easier it will be to find your way to the #1 position.

Something else you might want to try is using keyphrases that work. Using an excellent free log analyzer called
AWStats, (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) you can see which keywords and keyphrases people are using to find you site.
Either way, it will give you a better idea of which words you should be targeting.

Best,

Lucas

Hi Lucas,

Thanks for the response. Maybe I didn't explain myself very well. Lets say you have 3 keyword phrases your optimizing the page for. All three are specific to one country. For example "Country Product1" "Country product2" "Country product3", etc. You list each product 4 times on your page and have text links on the page for each product, product listed in a heading, alt, etc. All the stuff your supposed to do. :-) Now you analize your page. If you do it with exact matching, ie "Country product1" it looks good numbers wise. Right number of incidences on the page, density, etc. But if you do an inexact match or partial keyword match your numbers go crazy and it says you have to high a density and too many incidences based upon it including the country count along with the product count.

Google and Yahoo are two good examples. Google apparently supports or used exact matching but Yahoo doesn't. We're getting better positioning in Google but in the basement on Yahoo, MSN and all the rest so I'm just wondering if it's because with inexact or partial matching it looks like were spaming? I know most people don't use "" when searching.

Lou