The theory of obtaining a decent search engine placement to attract free traffic to your site is pretty basic. Select a high traffic, low competition keyword to aim for. Buy a domain name with the keyword in it. Then simultaneously create keyword-focused content for the site while building incoming links that mention the chosen keyword phrase.
With enough patience your site will rise up the rankings and with your better search engine placement your traffic will grow.
But I'm here to tell you that you could be getting even more traffic from the same results if only you used the concept of “keyword mashing” to get a decent search engine placement for multiple keywords rather than just one.
What Is Keyword Mashing?
Keyword mashing simply involves targeting more than one keyword phrase in your web content writing. This may not sound too exciting (or new) but stick with me for a moment while I better explain the concept.
Let's imagine you're creating a website about dog training. The primary keyword you come up with for your homepage after some research is “doberman training”.
But of course there were other keywords you found which had a lot of potential so eventually you had to make a difficult decision and dropped the others. For the sake of argument let's pretend that one of the other keywords that looked good was “training techniques”.
Rather than choosing between the two different keyword phrases, using the concept of keyword mashing you would add both these phrases together into a single longer phrase – in our case “doberman training techniques” – and use this as your primary keyword phrase.
How Does Keyword Mashing Help Your Search Engine Placement?
Not only is it far more likely that an exact-match domain is available for this longer keyword phrase but we now have a chance of getting to the top of the search engines for both these keyword phrases which means far more potential traffic as a result of multipe search engine placements.
But it gets better. We all know Google hates artificial-looking links. You know – the ones where you quickly build hundreds of links to your site all with exactly the same text? Can anyone say “sandbox”?!
But by targeting two keyword phrases for your site you suddenly have a perfect opportunity for some link diversity. In our example we would build some links with the hypertext “doberman training techniques”, some saying “doberman training” and still others saying “training techniques”. This diversity of link text makes our linking appear more natural to the search engines, boosts our chances of higher search engine placement and furthermore these rankings are for multiple keyword phrases.
How To Use Keyword Mashing For Better Search Engine Placement
Of course keyword mashing works best when you're building a new site from scratch because you can carefully plan out your site structure and keyword arrangement to make the most of this concept.
But I have even used it for existing sites and easily got extra top rankings and traffic as a result. The key to leveraging keyword mashing for existing sites is to look for keyword phrases that work together in one “natural sounding” phrase.
So take the homepage of your existing website and consider words that could be added to the beginning or end of your primary keyword phrase then use your standard keyword research process to decide on which target will be best.
Let's say for example we have a website that targets the phrase “how to surf” it might be that we could target both the phrases “how to surf” and “surf lessons” by adding the word “lessons” at the end of our website name and then building some links to our site that contains this text.
What has your experience been with keyword mashing? Depending upon the link authority that existing sites in the same niche have, you will often see rapid improvements in search engine placement and organic traffic as a result of using this keyword mashing technique.