Clumsy Keyword Phrases, Stop Words and More…

Yesterday we looked at how to find little monetized keywords we could use to our advantage. Often these phrases are clumsy enough not many webmasters will bother trying to optimize for them, but ignoring a phrase with over 4,000 searches per month and virtually no search results is a mistake!

‘Clothing pets’ is not getting any attention from advertisers as seen by the minimal cost of advertising – and there are no direct matches on the SERPs for that keyword phrase. This is where I could make my move. If I could corner the market on 4,000 searches per month, I can make a killing in conversions!

My goal now is to prepare pages with optimized content to be indexed by the search engines. ‘Clothing pets’ is a little awkward to work into a sentence, but there are a few tricks I can try.

Google used to ignore words like a, an, the, and, it, but, and many others. With recent tweaks to their algorithm, many rumors have been flying that ‘stop words’ such as these are no longer to be disregarded, although others say that in actuality Google has gotten smart enough to know the difference between insignificant words and ones that have import.

I’ll hedge my bets just to be safe – try to get my main keyword phrase in intact, or only using punctuation to make it grammatically correct, and use variations including stop words as my secondary keyword phrases.

Here goes, a lovely landing page:

“Introducing PetsStyles’ Fall Line of Clothing Pets Will Love!! As the days shorten and the temperature drops, you probably feel the need for warmer clothing. Pets do too! Fortunately, we have all the most stylish outfits for your pet’s winter wardrobe, including dog coats and puppy hoodies. We carry only the finest clothing for pets, made in the USA from American products and backed with a 100% guarantee. Check out our new fall selection, and receive a 10% discount today only on all clothing, pets’ accessories and homemade treats for dogs and cats.”

Get the idea? Once this page is indexed, I’ll have a terrific chance of it getting ranked well on the results pages, especially if I can manage to get some decent links to it. That page could actually be easily tweaked into a press release, and submitted for publication as well.

I might even consider throwing some AdWords money at it – the cost is minimal as I have seen, and I might be able to rank some nice clicks. I’ll run a short one month campaign to see how it plays out.

This is only one example of how you too can start ranking for undervalued keyword phrases. They don’t have to be misspellings, just an awkward combination that seems clumsy to optimize for, and has been overlooked when it comes to search volume and potential conversions.

Once you have found a phrase to optimize for, do it whole heartedly for a month, and you will see if it is worth the extra effort. These tactics won’t work every time, but you might just find a huge traffic driver that can boost your sales through the roof!!