Use product and service names as keywords on your web pages.

As many of you know, I am running an on-going experiment between two very different approaches to making a few pennies from web sites relating to coffee.

CoffeeDetective.com and CoffeeBestBuys.com

I’m learning something new as each days passes.

Right now, I am quite surprised by what I have learned about the effectiveness of product names as organic search keywords.

Tortoise for the long haul...

When writing the Coffee Detective site I went to a great deal of trouble looking for strong keywords and phrases for every page on each level.

Using various tools within the site building and marketing package I'm using for this site, SiteBuildIt, I selected dozens of keywords with good demand and reasonably low supply.

And I have no argument with any of that.

The Coffee Detective site is a long-term project. The tools I have been using are right for the job and I steadily keep adding content and building traffic.

But it does take time. It takes time for the major search engines to rub their chins and decide how to rank your site and list your pages.

Meanwhile, over at Coffee Best Buys, now approximately one month old, I’m receiving a surprising amount of organic traffic from Google and MSN.

The Coffee Detective site is now six months old and certainly took a lot longer to attract Google’s attention. So how come I’m getting organic search traffic faster with the new site?

Enter the hare, kind of...

The thing about the Coffee Detective site is that it is not directly about products. It’s an information site first and foremost, with some links to places where you can buy coffee and related products.

This means some of the search terms I have optimized for are fairly generic...like “gourmet decaf coffee”.

By way of contrast, over at the Coffee Best Buys site, which is actually a blog, the headline for each post includes a specific product name...whether it be the brand name of a coffee, or a make of coffee brewer or grinder.

And that’s where I’m getting the occasional good listing in Google and MSN.

I have no chance of competing with better established sites for terms like ‘coffee’ and ‘gourmet coffee’.

But I can get a good listing with a term like ‘best price douwe egbert coffee’ or ‘kitchenaid proline grinder’.

My point being?

It’s early days with my comparison between these two sites.

I’m not going to rush into changing either one based simply on a week or two or learning from the other.

But I will perhaps add some product-specific pages to the Coffee Detective site, particularly as we approach the end of year retail season. They will be information-packed pages, in character with the rest of the site. I’ll simply get some product names into the headlines, titles etc.

And there is one more thing I have learned from the Coffee Best Buys site. Watch for what is new.

If a new coffee maker is launched next week, it will have a new name.

And a new product name is a new keyword.

And because it is new, that keyword will not yet have a zillion other sites competing for it.

You may not be in the coffee business...but this same tactic can be applied across any industry.

Watch for new product or service names, and use them as keywords...quickly.

CoffeeDetective.com
CoffeeBestBuys.com

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