Keywords rotation strategy - how often and how much should you do it?

You have a lot of things to say about your brand online, and it is likely that you have more keywords you want optimized than what the search engines cares to look for. Most SEO experts can tell you search engines weight the importance of your keywords based on their positions in your webpage and META tag orders. For example, if you have the following META description tag:

meta name="description" content="Serving Donuts, Coffee, Muffins for the Bridgewater neighborhood - Save an additional 15% when you print our online coupon"

For many search engine, the words Serving Donuts is the most important if you also have a lot of "Donuts" in your site copy. Followed by Coffee, then Muffins. Then the question becomes: what about that 15% coupon for dozen donuts that I want people to search on? What if I want to capture the coffee crowd searching online?

Keyword rotation is a relatively simple concept to implement, you move your keywords around in your META tags, revise the site copy a little to reflect that change, and off you go. But there are three important points to consider:

1. Don't change them too often
Since it takes many search engine bots a month or more to crawl through your site again, rotating your keywords too often will not maximize your exposure in that keyword set. The frequency of rotation depends on a lot of variables, including but not limited to: domain age, number of keywords you want optimized, is the upcoming keyword set season-based, are they one-time special based, etc.

If your domain has a good history (1+ year), you can rotate as often as every 4 months. Since it takes about 1 monthe for the search engine to re-crawl your site and index, and your subsequent social marketing efforts to take effect, 4 months will help you really establish your position with those keywords. If you domain is realatively new (less than 1 year), you might want to hold off rotating any keywords and focus on building a strong keyword positions on your primary keywords set first.

2. Don't go off topic
While rotating keywords will help you gain positions on a large set of keywords, keep in mind your primary keyword set should not disappear. In the above example, Donuts and Coffee should always be mentioned simply because that's what you are. The bottom line: don't get too carried away with keywords rotation strategy.

3. Let your social media spearhead the strategy instead
Translation: Don't be lazy! While keyword rotation strategy can help capture the search crowd, you will still need to spend the time and broadcast to the world what you want people to know about. This is especially true for seasonal keywords and offer-specific keywords. Utilize your Facebook fan base and Twitter followers base and let them know more about you.