Long Tail Keywords: SEO Urban Legend or Buried Diamonds?

Have you ever heard of the term long tail keyword ? The internet is growing at a rate that mostly any top level keyword has millions of competitors. When I started my online journey I failed miserably when it came to getting the really good traffic, the organic search traffic that is. I was some how hoping that my small ten page site could outrank Amazon and even Wikipedia for a top level keyword. But.. It never happened.

One aspect of building profitable websites that can be easily overlooked is the fact that ranking for a top level keyword is almost impossible in most niches at least for a new site. Enter long tail keywords.

The existence of these keywords is due to the fact that most web surfers use more than one word in their searches in an attempt to filter out their queries and find more relevant results. There is a very high chance that you have stumbled on this term before if you were looking for some SEO tips to give your sites some extra boost. The magic behind these keywords is that usually they have less competitors unless, you are trying to target “make money online” of course. If you study the long tail in your niche, you will probably find there are a lot of phrases that have listings that are not near as optimized as they could be and that can easily be conquered by tweaking your content and getting anchored text links containing those phrases. Keyword research is crucial. Trying to conquer the wrong long tail keywords can be as counter productive and time consuming as going head first for the top level keyword.

When searching for long tail keywords to profit from, consider this these tips in your market research:

• Use quotes to see how many sites are using the exact phrase. Example: “your targeted phrase”

• Pay special attention to how many of the top results have the phrase in the title. You can then make a search using the all in title query. Example: allintitle:your targeted keyword Ask yourself are there many sites targeting the phrase in their title? How does the all in title query results compare with the phrase match (quotes) results?

• How many links to page (not to the total for the domain have) does every top 10 result have? Tip: The SEO for Firefox extension does this automatically if you specify it. You can also check for links to domain with this extension.

• Are top rankers are individual pages are they whole sites? (http://www.competitor.com or http://www.whatever.com/competitor.html) The point is that outranking somebodys home page is usually more difficult than trying to outrank an individual page. The premise: Most links on a website point to the home page.

• Do the pages have page rank? Again SEO for firefox is useful here and will save you time.

• Are there any mega sites in the top spots. (Wikipedia, Amazon, Associated Press, About.com or similar) The premise: Domain age and site authority make them so strong in search that can outrank less authoritative sites even without external links pointing to the ranking page directly.

• Compare search results from phrase match and normal every day broad match. Are they similar? Note: This is where domain authority shows its ugliest face.

• Phrases in the meta description tag will also give you a hint about how much the keywords are targeted by the top sites in a particular listing.

Hope this helps a little in your SEO strategy. Have you tried targeting the long tail? What is your experience? What do you think about targeting the long tail?

Posts you might also like:

• How To Make Money Online Blogging

I wanted to share with you some tactics that have given me great results when it comes to search engine traffic and making money online with blogs. Seems like a lot of people have trouble getting organic traffic to their blogs so I decided to give yo

• SEO basics part 2 The title tag in html

Title tags are considered by SEO experts as one of the most important elements in optimizing a page for search engines. A title tag not only helps crawlers index your site, it helps them determine where can your site be placed in a directory and its

• Wordpress-Setting Your Free Automatic Affiliate Link Injection Machine

Have you spent hours digging through old posts in your blog in an attempt to find phrases to drop your affiliate links on? If this sounds like you then you are just wasting your time. Here is a method to take your linking to the next level, bring lif

• 8 Basic tips to rank better for your keywords

Keywords are words that relate directly with your sites content. These words are fundamental in the whole SEO process. When keywords are used correctly they allow for better search engine placement therefore, increasing your traffic dramatically. The

• SEO basics part 3: The Meta description tag in html

After adding a Title tag to your web site, the next step to consider while optimizing your site for search engines is adding a meta description tag. This tag’s function, as the name implies, is adding a description to your site or individual page. Al

• SEO basics part 1 Introduction to search engine optimization

As we all know search engines are the most known web traffic generating tools in the internet. When we write words or phrases for example, in the Yahoo! search box we are expecting to get results showing pages that match our interests. By using searc

Popularity: 6% [?]