It’s generally true that the more keywords you put on your site, the better it does in organic search. But not always. 

In fact, many business-to-business sites suffer from keyword confusion to the point of keyword cannibalization.

When search engines spider your site, they are looking for more than just a jumble of words. They are looking for logic and consistency about how those words are used.

Say, for instance, that your main product, widgets, is used as a keyword throughout your site. That’s a good thing.

But what if the titles, descriptions, keywords and page content for several different pages all use widgets? And links, inside and outside your site, point to different pages? The simple answer is that the search engines get confused.

And the result is keyword cannibalization, with your pages actually competing against each other for search ranking. And, more importantly, someone else’s page moves to the top of the search engine rankings page.

The remedy is an SEO-enhanced site strategy that follows a few general rules:

• If a word or phrase is important enough to be a keyword, it ought to have a page.
• One page is designated as the page for a keyword or phrase.
• All other references to a keyword or phrase are linked to that individual page.

That means SEO needs to be considered from the outset, when sites are being created. Not as an after-thought, or add-on.

In essence, the site’s branching tree should look a lot like the keyword list. And vice versa.