Targeting similar keywords

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Nathan Veenstra: No. Take the 10 main keywords and write the best articles you can write about them. Include the variations if appropriate. What you’d be doing otherwise is create doorway pages: a page for each (small) variant. It doesn’t help your visitors nor does it make the World Wide Web better. That’s why.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: It`s not quite doorway pages to do that. Doorway pages exist to filter people through variant phrase dedicated pages into a different end page. (Hence, the "doorway" label) Having said that, Nathan is correct in all other regards. Trying to optimize multiple pages for the same core focus to "rank for all the variations" is pure spam. It insults visitors, and is toxic for sustainable SEO.
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  Stockbridge Truslow: With the days of RankBrain upon us - this type of thing (for most topics, anyway) is going to start to hurt more than help. Google knows that Hot Dogs, Franks, and Wieners are the same thing. If now have 100 different pages to cover all the variations of "All Beef Hot Dog Condiments" they`re all pretty much going to say the same thing. Sure, you didn`t want duplicate content so they aren`t identical - but you have one goal in mind, so they are all pretty much giving the same message. The trick comes when Google is sorting the SERPs - which of your 100 pages is the best one to send someone to? So those 100 pages have to compete with each other BEFORE they even get a chance to compete with the rest of the wiener condiments pages on the web. Your page might do okay for exact matches, but if people refine their search a bit in order to get better results (which happens often if there are a lot of pages out there) to something like "Yellow or Brown Mustard for All Beef Hot Dogs" - you`re done for. Each of your 100 pages might talk about mustard - and some may talk about yellow or brown - but which one is really the best page to send someone to for the answer? There are some exceptions - like when it`s up to us to help RankBrain understand concepts it hasn`t encountered before - but even then, I don`t personally think it`s a great strategy to create a cluster of self competing pages. Direct matches for the words in the URL can help - but you can also search for "Franks" and see "site.com/hot-dogs" with hot dogs in bold. URL keyword matching can fire with semantic siblings, too. And URL keyword matching isn`t as powerful as it used to be - heck, Google hides the URL itself a lot of times now (especially on mobile).
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  Doc Sheldon: Agree with Alan and Stockbridge, and would add just one more comment: If you`re putting up pages for "hot dogs", "franks" and "weiners", you`re just building pages to compete with each other. St the end of the day, you`ve added nothing of value for your visitors and nothing of value for the search engines; so you`ve added nothing of value for your site (and quite probably, harmed it)
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  Dave Elliott: One of the last Google updates was done to put a stop to this.using different pages to target similar variations is not a good idea.
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  Dawn Anderson: variations of terms are mostly considered the same through query stemming, etc so NO. Build some great pages. Group together the terms which are similar and build pages with great content for those groups. Separate terms into head, torso, longer tail. Map pages / terms to intent
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  Danny Dekker: yes yes! This is great feedback. I`ve meanwhile designed the page layout and links and agree with your points. I am not going to spend(waste) time making pages for the same things