Has the zenith of keyword-centered optimization been crossed?

A few years ago this whole thing was still easy: when someone wanted a used car they would type in “used car” into Lycos, Altavista or whichever searchengine had the lowest mistrust at the time and click on one of the first results. This behavior of searching was mainly due to the index being extremely lucid at the time and the fact that refined, more precise searchphrases would lead to noticeably less and (therefore) qualitatively worse results. A lot has happened in the meantime: the index ~~of the searchengines~~ of Google has grown enormously and the quality of results even for long searchphrases, that consists of more than two or three words, has gotten better considerably.

I find it interesting that the procedures in many parts of the SEO-industry have not been adjusted accordingly. Keywordresearch, which leads to a list with a handful of keywords as a result, is still a popular approach – which also is the result of my (incognito) OMD-tour of the SEO-agencies. It is being suggested that even wide ranges of topics could be covered by working off these keywords. What is being concealed is that by doing this a wide and growing (!) part of the audience is being ignored. An open secret for many branches is: the more “longtailed” the better converting.

Sure, there are still sites for which the optimization to a manageable amount of diverse keywords is the right way and good placement for keywords like “Poker” or “Kredit” do have their charm. I still believe that, today the strategy for a general, not immediately keyword-oriented strengthening of a domain is especially important for extensive websites and is often being neglected.

Johannes Beus - on Fri (09/19/2008) at 22:59 PM

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