Most of us have been told at some point and time to use moderation and not over indulge. This advice holds true when it comes to negative keywords in paid search campaigns. Just like over indulgence, too many negative keywords can hurt your paid search campaigns.

Negative keywords are designed to help tighten the focus of your campaign. Let’s say you’re a jewelry company that only sells solid silver jewelry and your company bids on related keywords. Negative keywords that could benefit your campaign are “how to clean”, “wholesale supplier”, “how to make”, “gold and”, etc. All of these could potentially be negative phrase match keywords.

Negative phrase match keywords prevent your ads from showing when someone types in that keyword phrase in that particular order. This means that people searching for “how to clean silver jewelry”, “silver jewelry wholesale supplier”, “how to make silver jewelry”, and “gold and silver jewelry” should not trigger your ads to show. This is a positive because your company doesn’t give tutorials on how to clean or make silver jewelry, you’re not a wholesale supplier and you don’t sell gold jewelry. However, too many negative keywords could actually be a negative and block your ads from showing for relevant searches.

Negative keywords become a negative to your paid search campaigns when they block your ads from showing for relevant searches.  Let’s continue with the example above. If your company adds a negative such as “buy silver chains”, it could be blocking potential customers, especially if you are bidding on the term “silver chains” to refer to a necklace. In this example your company is working against its own paid search campaigns.  It could be that “silver chains” is attracting people who are looking for silver purse chains, silver chains for their fence, as well as those people who are looking to buy a necklace. Instead of adding “buy silver chains” as a negative, consider adding negatives such as “purse chains”, and “fence chains.” This allows your company’s ads to continue to show for searches like “silver chains”, but at the same time it excludes certain purse and fence chain terms from triggering your ads.

Negative keywords should always be a positive and not a negative to paid search campaigns. It’s good to add negative keywords, but don’t go overboard. If negative keywords are keeping your ads from showing for relevant searches, then it’s time to make some adjustments.

Keyword density, proximity, repetition – placing your keywords properly can be a major part of an SEO campaign. It’s easy become overwhelmed and obsessed with finding the perfect words or phrases to fit your pages, then cramming keywords in.

A basic guideline we give our clients is a keyword density of 2% – 4% per webpage, meaning a keyword or keyphrase should only appear four times or less for every 100 words. Anymore than that, and search engines may flag the page for spam. Four-percent may not sound like a lot, but you can try it for yourself. Read a selection of text with a keyword density of 5% or more out loud to yourself. You may be surprised at just how “spammy” it sounds, or how difficult it is to read.

It’s important to remember that good SEO is more than trying to find the right amount of words in the right order to gain the attention of a search engine. Many other factors come into play and keyword density is just one of them (and it’s not even the most important one). When you look at a few of what Google considers to be important factors in SEO, like inbound links and the growth of social search, you can see that quality content is what earns high rankings.

When developing content for your site, try not to obsess over keywords. Instead, focus on creating compelling content that people will share. Always remember to optimize for the user, not the search engine.

Below are some SEO friendly ways to target a specific “theme” or keyword on important pages of your site for SEO purposes:

• Write compelling content: The foundation of your website is to present content that is well written, has a specific purpose (am I selling something, presenting information etc.?)
• Once the specific content goals of your website are established, write down the theme for all of your important pages and try to narrow the theme down into a two to five word keyphrase.
• Take the list of keyphrases for all of your pages and perform the ever-important keyword research. Free tools such as the Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and paid tools, such as Wordtracker are very effective for researching things like search volumes and KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).
• Once a keyword decision has been made, incorporate those words on pages of your site in an SEO and user-friendly way; the chosen keyphrase for your pages should be incorporated into the meta tags in the section of your site.
• The title meta tag should contain the keyphrase for the page as close to the beginning of the tag as possible, as this piece of meta data is weighted the highest by the search engines.
• The descriptions meta tags should contain, essentially, descriptive and compelling ad copy incorporating the primary keyphrase in a natural way; the better and more unique your descriptions are, the greater the probability that data from the descriptions will show up in the search results as the “snippet” of information below the title tag for the page.
• The keywords meta data is now ignored by Google and Bing, so no need to over-think this one, but at least include the keyphrase for the page as keywords could be used again down the road to assign relevancy for a web page.
• Learn about all of this and more on the MoreVisibility YouTube channel: SEO Video Tutorials.