Long Tail Keywords: SEO Urban Legend or Buried Diamonds?
Posted on | December 23, 2008 | 10 Comments
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?
Comments
10 Responses to “Long Tail Keywords: SEO Urban Legend or Buried Diamonds?”
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December 23rd, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
I’d definitely think that this is possible. I do not think it is a myth but it is hard to find long tail keywords.
December 29th, 2008 @ 9:18 am
@Luis, I totally agree on your view. In fact, I started doing a little bit of SEO for my blog to consistently maintain the search traffic at least at 45-50% levels and I found that the secondary keywords can do the trick.
There’s not much point in competing for the top keywords unless you have like a PR6 page with a lot of search traffic and a very old domain.
December 29th, 2008 @ 9:54 am
@Ajith: The long tail has the advantages of pulling more targeted traffic. I usually build my niche sites purely on long tail and it is funny that the traffic I get almost triples the traffic that I get in this blog. But then again, I have only built a couple of links to this blog since I use it as a tool to build friends online. Almost all of my marketing efforts go to the other niches.
@Blog Expert: Good Long tail keywords are easy to find. It just takes a little time to find the good ones. Use the Adwords keyword tools, Seo Book tool or word tracker.
January 12th, 2009 @ 3:04 am
Nice work man..keep it up.
January 12th, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
There is one website called hittail dot com that you can take a look. I just requires you to put some codes on your site and helps list all your long tail keywords that you should use.
Peter Lee
January 12th, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
Will check it out. Currently I use Rank Tracker to help me find keywords and see how am I doing. It is great piece of software. Makes me save a lot of time. I used to do it manually though. Too time consuming.
March 11th, 2009 @ 11:08 pm
[...] or something. Now what SEO benefit can you gain if the blogs that you comment do not allow keywords? Nothing perhaps a little page rank to your home page. Unless you want to sell links in the future, [...]
May 1st, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
Using those long tail keywords not only help with getting ranked but also help significantly with driving targeted traffic to your site. I find that when I add modifiers to the keywords that it works very well and not just with PPC but for organic searching as well. I think you are spot on as far as you saying long tail is going to be the main way to reach your site because of the shear volume of competitors.
May 14th, 2009 @ 10:57 am
It’s one thing knowing what keywords to target but it’s another thing knowing which targeted keywords will bring in higher ROI. Long tail keywords have proven to drive more qualified traffic but with much less search volume. But I guess what we all want is to target our main audience with fewer click throughs.
Thanks.
June 2nd, 2009 @ 10:20 am
SEObook seems like it can be a time saver for finding long tail keywords that recieves decent traffic.