Great keywords can help a lot. But sometimes not at all.
Recently, two important things have happened at my SBI site, CoffeeDetective.com.
First, I finally made it to #1 on Google for the term "how to make coffee".
I'm pretty pleased with that. I beat out some pretty stiff competition. And it's a very relevant and important phrase for my site.
Just goes to show the impact of careful search engine optimization.
So yes, doing well with the right keywords can help a lot. I have seen a very significant surge in traffic since I hit the #1 spot for that phrase.
But sometimes, keywords have nothing to do with the success of a page at all.
One day a few weeks ago I was thinking about my site and about how many people went to my "best coffee makers" page.
A big proportion of visitors were going there, and I had a nagging feeling that the page probably didn't satisfy everyone's needs. I have plenty of third level pages I link to from that page, but I still wasn't happy about my visitors' reactions when they first arrived at the coffee maker page. I had a feeling many would think. "Nah, this isn't what I'm looking for."
So I put my thinking cap on. I can't tell you exactly what happened while I was thinking, because I can't remember. But I know I went straight to my computer and started creating two new pages: Coffee Makers for under $50 and Coffee Makers for under $100.
These are third-level pages. I simply link directly to them from the main column on my home page.
I get almost no search engine traffic for these pages.
These pages barely make the top 50 as entry pages.
They are not featured in my left nav bar.
But...they are numbers 5 and 6 in terms of traffic across my entire site.
And they have quickly become the biggest-earning pages on the site.
Nothing to do with keywords. Nothing.
In fact, none of the research tools one uses when optimizing a site helped me identify these page topics as being important to my readers.
It was 100% intuition.
I just guessed that these page topics might be what my "coffee maker" visitors were looking for.
There's an important lesson here.
As important as keywords are, they will not always help you identify the page topics that are most important to your visitors.
People don't type "coffee makers under $100" into search forms. They type in "best coffee makers".
It's only when they SEE the words "coffee makers under $100" on my home page that they suddenly think, "Oh yeah, THAT's what I really want."
So how could this apply to your site?
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This site describes and chronicles my own experience building a money-making web site with the Site Build It system.