In the guidelines for webmasters Google says webpages are to be created for not for search engines but for users so that they will find your site useful and return to your site quite often. Further, regarding the use of keywords, Google guidelines advise you to think of keywords or key phrases that your visitors may use to find your site and use those keywords in your text as well as in the keyword meta tags.

Recently I read an article published in the SEO section of a webmasters forum about how some shrewd SEOs promise to bring you on top of the search results. Everyone wants to be on top of the SERPs for their niche keywords or phrases. But it is ALWAYS not possible for laymen like me (perhaps you too) to get our pages on top of the search results. That is why people hire the services of experts like SEOs.

Now look at what an SEO did for his client so that he delivered the result as promised but the client lost most of the traffic for the page and also the sales generated by that page (changes are made in the story to hide identity of the client and SEO).

The client happened to be in the business of selling products for pets including dogs. Now the word dog will return you 312 million webpages in search results (try the keywords on Google search to understand better). If your site is about dogs, your chance for getting on top is 1: 312,000,000 or never! The key phrases like ‘dog care New York’ (33,300,000 results) also returned huge number of websites/ webpages so that it was rather impossible for that client to come on top of SERPs, keeping other SEO factors the same.

So, the SEO rewrote the contents of all the pages regarding dogs replacing dogs with ‘Canis lupus familiaris’, the scientific name for dogs and changing the meta tags too. Now the keywords returned 18,200 for ‘Canis lupus familiaris care’ and 5,370 for ‘Canis lupus familiaris care New York’. The “wise” SEO made similar changes and the client was on top of the search results for most of his keywords and phrases. Happily he said bye to the SEO (only after paying a little bit of extra bills claimed by him, the bulk of the payment was paid in advance).

But the client found to his horror the sales dropping to the rock bottom and the traffic too falling to an all time low. Frantically he ran to the SEO and explained his plight. But the SEO smiled and said, “I only promised to bring you on top of the search results. I never promised anything on your sales or traffic”.

What went wrong, and where? Simple! Excepting a very small section of scientific community and researchers in zoology, NOBODY uses the term ‘Canis lupus familiaris’ for dog! But none of them are interested in buying dog care products. So, the obvious result is ZERO conversions or sale PLUS rock-bottom traffic.

BOTTOMLINE: Use common sense, use terms that are used commonly by your visitors.