Long Tail Keywords May Be SEM’s New Friend
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 27 of August , 2008 at 7:59 am
With Google’s introduction of Suggest, it may be time to reassess the use of long tail keywords. From an SEO point of view, most long tail keywords won’t result in streams of traffic but depending on the search volume of those keyword phrases it could product highly targeted visitors. However, who said you had to use only the one long tail?
As you add a word to a keyword, you almost halve the number of likely queries. By the time you get to five or six words in your long tail, the number of search queries is likely to be small. This is why researching your keywords is very important. Having said that, the longer the tail, the more targeted the traffic will be.
If you intend to go down the long tail keyword track, you will need to select plenty of them. For each or several long tail keyword phrases, create at least one page of good content, the more the better that has been optimized for that long tail. You will need to do this for each of the long tail keywords selected. Use the URL to your long tail content pages in your resource box. Getting these pages indexed and collecting inbound links will be needed to get to the top of the search results.
Each long tail keyword may only attract small amounts of traffic compared to standard keywords. However, as you add additional long tails to your list, the traffic will grow. Take a handful or more of well optimized long tail keywords and you will be surprised at the increase in traffic. More importantly, as searchers take to Google’s Suggest, you will be there, prepared with those long tails already optimized. That’s when your hard work will really start to reap the rewards.
Category: Keyword Research
Comment by Carlene Golding
Made Tuesday, 9 of September , 2008 at 8:42 am
May I see an example of a long tail keyword. I am not sure I get what you mean?
Thank you,
Carlene
Comment by Nick Stamoulis
Made Tuesday, 9 of September , 2008 at 9:21 am
Hi Carlene,
Here is a definition of long tail keyword phrases:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/define-long-tail-keywords.htm
Comment by Chris McElroy aka NameCritic
Made Tuesday, 9 of September , 2008 at 9:11 pm
Like the difference between ranking for SEO or Florida SEO Service.
Someone who types in just SEO could be just looking for information, articles, blogs to read, etc.
Someone who types in Florida SEO Service likely lives in Florida and needs to hire an SEO company and wants to hire a local SEO company to be even more specific.
You would get more traffic for the shorter phrase, but your conversion rate for the longer phrase would be much higher.
I threw in a long tail phrase that was also geo-targeted, but you get the idea.
Comment by Richard Aubin
Made Thursday, 18 of September , 2008 at 7:44 pm
Google Suggest is pretty cool for discovering long tail keywords.
Here’s how to “expand” your keyword list (Nick, see end message note)
Use any root keyword, let’s say: search
Then type in the letter a.
You’ll get a list of top long tails for that begin with the letter a.
Now go down the list with:
search aa
search ab
search ac… etc.
Write down all positive paired results (search aaaa probably would be negative) eg. search engine, search results would be the paired results of the following long tails: search engine optimization, search results page.
Then process each paired result like:
search engine aa
search engine ab etc…
search results aa
search results ab
rinse, recycle, repeat.
Note: Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a little program that does this for you with multiple sources of auto-suggesting long tail providing websites (like google suggeset) and it would implement a generous time-delay politness policy between requests to minimize external server interruption.
Imagine the list of related long tails you would discover. Nick… if you write this, I want 50% of the profits generated by its sale or use 
Comment by recordonlineguide.blogspot.com
Made Tuesday, 21 of October , 2008 at 6:35 am
You can look up on google to find many sites which offer this service for free in cluding background check ups.
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