Building Words

One simple way to ensure that your content covers as many search terms as possible without looking contrived and clunky is to use building words.

Building words are simply the words that you can use to build keywords that relate to your site. They come in 5 major flavours:

Global keywords:
These are the main categories that your site falls in to. Let's say we're optimizing the party supplies site. These main keywords could be: Party, anniversary, wedding, birthday.

Stop words:
These are words that search engines do not index because they are too common but that can make for a smooth writing style. If you ever research keywords on sites like Wordtracker and find results like 'balloons UK' and think "why would anyone search for that?", the chances are that they have searched for 'balloons in the UK' but the search engine has removed the stop words. Stop words include words like: a, about, all, me, the, as, is, but, to, for. This adds up to rather a large list of words which is worth remembering. A more comprehensive list of words can be found by typing 'Stop Words' into Wikipedia.

Localised words:
These can help to give your keywords a localised theme and can give you an extra chance to use a keyword. Village & town names, the name of your region or the countries that yours site is focused on can all help.

Modifiers:
These are words that add more meat the bones fo your general keywords. There are some more universal modifiers like help, info and ideas but if you search competitors sites for general keywords, you will find a host of modifiers attached to them For example, with the party site we have: favours, themes, supplies, decorations and so on.

Brand, Product & Event Names:
These names can mean you do well in a search for targeted keywords. It is important to know your market & trends. Current party supply brands include: Bratz, Harry Potter, Bob the Builder, Barbie and Winnie the Pooh.

If we begin to combine these words we can cover a multitude of keywords:

The keyword 'birthday' would make us an also-ran in a race with 179 million competitors. Furthermore, someone searching for the word 'birthday' could be looking for the birthday of a famous person,they could want cards or facts or they might want to buy presents, none of which are necessarily relevant to you. When we add modifiers, localised words stop words & brand names, however, we reduce the competition and increase the percentage of people who know what they want from a search. 'Bob the Builder birthday party ideas' not only has 8 competitors but your text also includes a number of different arrangements of keywords - "Bob the Builder', birthday, 'birthday party' birthday party ideas', 'party', 'ideas', 'party ideas' and so on meaning that, whilst you are writing naturally, you are making your site appealing to people who want to know about all of these things.

Writing naturally is the name of the game, however. it is worth writing a list of these keywords, stopwords, modifiers, brand names & localised words & then knowing which major keywords you want to focus on for any given page before writing but you should not try to religiously include all combinations of these words as your text will not appeal to the people who do visit your page - this is counterproductive.