This question pops up time and again: why can I only add one focus keyword to your SEO plugin? People seem to think they have to set several keywords for each post. This post explores the reasoning behind that, very deliberate, decision.
This is the input field I’m talking about:
The focus keyword is not the meta keywords tag
This is important to note, if you think the “focus keyword” field is where you fill your meta keywords: no it’s not. I have a very specific opinion about meta keywords, which I expressed in my post: meta keywords, why I don’t use them. Read that if you haven’t yet.
Focus on your focus keyword
Think of the focus keyword as the topic of your page or post. A good post doesn’t have multiple topics, it explores one topic. If you enter a focus keyword, the Page Analysis functionality will use that as input for its analysis of your post. It can only do this for one focus keyword at a time.
While that’s a technical reason, working around that wouldn’t be an issue. What is an issue, and also the main reason the functionality works as it does, is that we’ve found it’s already hard for most people to focus a page on one keyword. Optimizing a post for multiple keywords without spamming is actually very hard. So, try and optimize your pages for one keyword and do that well.
Determining a good focus keyword
The focus keyword input field has a bit of functionality to help you figure out what would be a good choice for that keyword. If you start typing, it opens a drop down with suggestions, these are loaded from Google Suggest and mimic what you’d see if you’d enter the search terms in a Google search field, compare this:
With this:
If people are searching, they’ll almost always get a drop down like that now, so the contents of it should be something you take into account when determining your focus keyword.
When you’re thinking about keywords, it’s probably also a good idea to read this post about cornerstone content and my post about the basis of keyword research.
hahaha so this post is literally ‘keyword stuffed’ :P
Yes it is ;) deliberately ;)
Great to see the initiative taken by Yoast team in their plugins to at least change the wordpress users/bloggers to consider a single topic to write on, this certainly brings the quality out of the blogger in his content most of the time rather than trying to focus on many keywords and end up spamming.
Focus Keyword option with the plugin is pretty good, but why I don’t use it is because it gives me a lot of suggestions after entering that. And then, I end up with an article which is SEO Optimized, but not optimized for readers.
This is the reason sometimes we have to do keyword research before writing anything. Otherwise the problem like yours always arise.
Yoast, you have the best SEO plugin in the industry. As a feature request, can you consider adding two or more focus keywords to a post ?
Dude did you actually read that post? :D
I’m still laughing at with that comment :D
I love when people comments to posts the haven’t read (it happened to me several, in my personal blog, in a post about a book)
This is my first comment on the blog, and I just wanted to comment that I absolutely love how you called him out about not reading post, although maybe it’s possible the OP was being sarcastic. haha. Either way, great website and I love the plugin. It has helped me immensely.
-scott
Funny! I read that twice and laughed! (Maybe it was a joke… if so, it got some laughs.)
Great post. I will save this explanation to share with clients.
haha…now that’s funny!
:) :) :) :) The “focus” seems 3D in this case. Leave the poor thing alone :)
I love the plugin but I know that clients find the status of the keyword (green checks) a little confusing as it doesn’t search through custom fields. Any intention to add this functionality?
Thanks Yoast, love your plugin, but I agree that searching through custom fields would be an amazing addition to already great plugin.
BTW – the keyword stuffing on this page is state of art:)
Thanks for answering this question Joost. I was wondering the same thing but after reading your post it answered it perfectly.
Thanks Joost I am using your SEO plugin and am loving it! The best part for me is being able to no index pages so easily.
Using meta keywords doesn’t do anything for SEO, But there are reasons why you could use them anyway. Some tools make good use of the meta keywords. Diigo, fo example proposes tags, based on the meta keywords. So you can influence the tags people will use to archive your articles. In the SEO plugin, I’ve used the %%tag%% variable to reuse the WordPress tags.
I find tags useful too. I think WordPress blog with large number of posts should have tags in them, makes the searching on blog much easier.
Haha love the above comments! But no really great post! Made for an interesting read.
I will probe your plugin right now. I hope it help me.
Thanks
I too had to chuckle with the comment – but more yours…Dude. I digress – so, I just started using your plugin for my WP sites. I also get frustrated some times with the green button. There are just times when I can’t get it green.
Great SEO tool! Use it on every wp site.
Nice SEO Tool for bloggers…..
One should try this friendly .
I love your plugin and use it on many sites. For some reason, every time I activate it on “Recent Earthquakes.net” it puts my site into a loop and the page won’t load. The site is dead until I deactivate. Once done, I’m back up. I reactivate and the site goes back down. What do I do?
This is the ONLY site I have a problem with… Love your Yoast SEO.
Bobby
Hi Yoast, I have a question. I have read many of your articles more than once, and still have some keyword confusion….
Example: for fantasy football I have an article titled top 25 fantasy receivers for 2013. The topic is very specific, but there are many articles on this…. Should I shoot for a keyword of “top fantasy football wide receivers 2013″, or is that too specific, and I am shorting myself?
I am not trying to fix one article’s SEO , more get an overall understanding. Thank you for your plugin and time.
I have the same question, please clarify thanks
Have been fiddling with this feature on your plug in and was about to pull my hair out trying to get all those green check marks! LOL I *think* I understand it a little better now, but I need to check out those other articles that you mentioned.
“A good post doesn’t have multiple topics, it explores one topic.”- true words. I think it was a great idea to implement “Focus Keyword” in your plugin as it force you to stay focused on the subject of your article…
The plugin deceides that a focus keyword “e-hrm consultant” is something different from “consultant e-hrm”. Shouldn’t it look for the two word seperately? i.e. are “e-hrm” and “consultant” mentioned?
No, because for competitive keywords, those are actually different SERPs
Thank you very much for posting. It is helpful for me to understand more about focus keyword. I am very interesting to learn further about keyword to optimize my site.
ok.. focus on keyword thats is key :)
The things people care about. It’s not like you can’t focus on another term in your text.
Just wondering if abbreviations or acronyms should be used within the focus keyphrase. I see that Google treats “IT competencies” different to “information technology competencies”. However, if I use in headings or content Yoast SEO page analysis scores low even though the keyword is found many times in the general tab.
Good morning Mr.Yoast, I hope today’s happiness is always with you.
I am very impressed with your plugin,
before I was frustrated with platinum seo
plugin, the plugin is nice but I am not happy.
So I use your plugin I began to see a light. I
want to ask, what is a good keyword focus for meta description, content, page titles and
URLs? Thank you
Focused keyword is the main keyword for which we are targintting the post. But long tail keywords are working better now. I wish to have option in Yoast
I’m glad you explained this — I had wondered, and your explanation makes sense. I have a little devil’s advocacy to offer, though.
I blog for some clients who use your plugin and have begun adding it to blogs myself. I think it’s a great training tool and helpful to show keyword optimization — something that isn’t always visible to clients.
However, I think unsophisticated users worry if, for example, the focus keyword is “remote workers” and the alt tag on the photo (of one person) is “remote worker.” The plugin gives a warning, though of course Google is more sophisticated than that. It would be nice if we could include two very similar variants of the keyword.
Having said that, I think your reasons for not allowing the use of two keywords are cogent — and better for most users.
Nice post… I agree that meta key words are not being used now by SEs but with the speed that things change with the Google algo, meta keywords may come back into play some day so I still fill in a couple for each post I do;)
I have a doubt here, should we use the exact key phrase in focus keyword or it could be altered by a word or 2?
Excellent post! I have used the plug in for a while now on many sites and have found it to be very helpful.
Love the plugin. However, this focus keyword setting is one area that gives us grief.
It doesn’t seem to ignore commas or dashes.
Is that because that’s important or is it something that could be added?
For example, we do a lot of optimizing for “keyword in City, State”. (e.g. adventure hikes near Portland, Oregon)
Sometimes in the post it makes sense to use the comma. Sometimes not (like the page URL).
So we don’t get to see that green box saying SEO is good.
Is there a work around for this?
Thanks!
There are some variations that result from the focus keyword suggestions. I’m not sure that relying upon how high up on the list a suggestion is indicates that it’s an optimal search term that you should use in your meta description and elsewhere. This happens most when a specific word can be listed at the beginning or end of a keyword phrase. For example, you might want to focus on shopping malls in New York. If I were to create the optimal text to describe these keywords it would probably be “new york shopping malls.” However, the generated list might suggest “shopping malls new york” at the top of its list and not even show “new york shopping malls” in the dropdown. I can surmise the reason for this but that’s not the issue – it’s that both search terms probably rank equally but the former use is the one that humans will expect more than the latter, which would appear a bit awkward to humans but not to the machine. As a result, I put in my focus keyword and don’t get bent out of shape if the suggest functionality doesn’t immediately indicate a match. Still, I find it a great tool. And if my assumptions might not be accurate, I’d enjoy hearing another opinion. :)
Hey Yost:
Do you believe the focus keyword to be outdated? Meaning Google has been hinting at people writing versus SEO writing. So lets say I write for Auto Mechanic Shoreline, the focus keyword tool, tells me I am writing a negative stop-word. It also directs me to post in metadescription, first paragraph and H2 heading……is this overoptimizing when I have 30+ posts on services that are similiar?
Would a dog groomer continuously write for local and continuously optimize his posts? example| Dog groomer Seattle, dog groomer Tacoma, dog groomer Seattle, Washington. ETC ETC all these are different keywords and are necessary for optimizing smaller surrounding cities.
I cant wait for your local plugin!
Great SEO Plugin for WordPress, So I love focus keyword tool of this plugin!
That’s one interesting read. Thanks!
On a side note: Yoast, If I have some patches for your WordPress SEO plugin, where can I send them to you?
joost at this domain ;)
I just migrated from all in one seo pack to WordPress SEO by your’s wordpress Seo plugin.and i found it much realible.
But my home page title name is displaying some random line(your site optimized title) as compared to what i had enter in the plugin home tile.
How should i change it..
Great tips. I started using this plugin once I started using my Genesis theme. It really is a great tool if using it correctly. I also made the mistake originally of thinking my posts should have focused on a number of topics. I am finding it better for my SEO efforts to keep my topics a bit broader.
Joost!! I have been using your SEO plugin for a couple of years now and always suggest it to others looking for a SEO plugin solution. The killer feature in your plugin is the page analysis tab. Great tool for optimizing for the search engines! Another plus is it wraps a few plugins together to help you with plugin “Bloat” such as XML sitemaps, 301 redirect, dofollow – nofollow – index – noindex to specific pages and more. Great work!!! Gets your most important plugins working together nicely :)
Great plugin – Following it’s directions keeps you well disciplined and on the way to having your articles found.
Actually this is interesting. I have been using all in one seo and it looks like it is working very well with meta keywords now I think I should make a good research about those keywords. Thanks
Good tips, I’ve found that I have much more success getting sitelinks showing for my domains in Google when I stick to the ‘one unique keyword per page’ technique as well.
It’s crazy that we still run SEO analysis on relatively new sites and find some with 40+ meta keywords stuffed into the header, there must be some sites with ~really~ bad advice doing the rounds!
Thanks Yoast..i just migrate from blogger to wordpress and start using plugin made by you..really wanna thank you for the great work…keep the good works going…:-)
Hi Yoast.
First I would like to thank you for great work you have done for Internet community – you really drive the progress in the Web man!
As for focus keywords – it’s true – the post should be specific on one narrow topic.
However, what do you think about synonyms?
Let’s say the keyword is “best car broker”. Maybe (I say maybe :)) it could be worth to add option to track the “best auto broker” (“car” –> “auto”) phrase too.
Why?
1. It’s IMO bad idea to create two distinct posts about #1 best car broker and #2 best auto broker;
2. Synonyms make the text easier to read – no one likes frequent repetitions of the same phrase;
What’s your opinion on this? :)
Hello Joost,
I have your plugin on mostly all of my sites and I love it.
I have All-In-One SEO Pack on a site that I have had for a while now. I even have the Pro version of it? I’m still scratching my head over that purchase?
Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk bad about anyone else product, and I’m not going to!
However, I would like it if you could answer a question for me?
Can I switch that particular site from the All-in-One SEO Pack to your plugin without losing all of my settings on each individual post / page ?
This is a valuable lesson that I have noted. Focus with a keyword is the key. I like it :)
thanks for telling the importance of using only one focus keyword in optimization…
and also the difference between meta keywords and the focus keyword..
it really helped me a lot
Thanks for the excellent plugin.
I was just using the natural SEO built into the Genesis framework before, but your plugin seems much more advanced.
I particularly like the keyword feature, but it’ll probably now take me a week or so going through all my old posts with the keyword analysis tool.
Hi Joost, I just installed it and looks very promising, thank you for making it available. I understand every page must be focused only in one kywd, and it is easy to conceptualize it for posts and individual pages, however when it comes to the home page where the content is not supposed to be “sticky” yet have overall info of the site (and usually the main landing page), how do you keep an individual post (or page holding the actual substantial content and focused kywd) from cannibalizing with the home page? Thnks again.
Nice Plugin. Thanks. Really you make WordPress SEO more easy with this plugin. And you make it more easy with focus keyword option. :)
I am new to blogging and have your plugin which has helped me a lot with SEO which I knew nothing about. Thanks for this post as well it has been of great help in learning more about focus keywords.
Good SEO article is good :)
Great read here man! Targeting great keywords and doing the proper research can make or break your SEO strategy. You’ve made it easy on all of us with your SEO plugin for WordPress. You rock!
Excellent plugin . . !
Nice Post I just found your website through about.me and your picture just made me lol I really like all the comic like stuff you have here really awesome and on top of that Ialso learned something – im totally blur when it comes to meta and keywords and all that :(
You made that about.me background yourself?
thanks for explaining!
I installed your wordpress seo plugin 2-3 days back, yet to explore all it has to offer.
thanks for the info. Now i know diffrent between meta and focus keyword…
Thanks for this post, and the info/plugin contained. KWs are so important for getting marketing strategies up and running (prior to being able to survey one’s list members)
Easy use a keyword base un you title and content,,simple..
Great post.
yoast best plugin on wordpress…and free…even beter..
I couldn’t agree more Joost! Matt Cutts said, If your content is all about “Car Services” there should also a related terms or LSI keywords/synoms in your content. Because if google found out that you are using that keyword repeatedly (Car Services), that will count as over optimization or spamming. So, don’t focus to only one targeted keyword, use LSI keywords as well.
Any chance to have to be able to use the focus keyword of each articles with the “Content of your RSS Feed” feature ? Would be powerful… Thank you
Thanks Joost, I am following your advice and using their tools on my blog and am getting great results.
You’re to be congratulated.
i have this mesege on admin :
Your theme contains a meta description, which blocks WordPress SEO from working properly, please delete the following line, or press fix it:
<meta name="description" content="” />
When i press “FIX” nothing happer,,how i remove this or fixed..??
thanks..
It is stated : “The keyword for this page contains one or more stop words, consider removing them. Found ‘a’.
What does it mean by “STOP WORDS”?
Thank you for the explanation.
Just deactivated All-in-one SEO and installed yours, and loving it! Thank you very much for making this good plugin and keeping it free!
I love this focus keyword feature so much! Very good initiative!!
can we add multiple Focus Keyword instead of one.
hello yoast,
your SEO plugin is really good but i only have “No” on this focus keyword at “Content” even when i add the keyword 20 times into this content.
What do i wrong?
You probably making a type mistake between your focus keyword, and the word in the contents. Check again!