Long Tail Search | Keyword Research

Long Tail Search

Millions of times a day searchers enter keywords and keyword phrases into the search engine search boxes. They’re searching for things you know about, things your website or your clients websites are centered around. Topics like:

• Low income mortgage information
• Creamed cucumbers recipe
• How to relieve lower back pain
• etc…

People come to the Internet to find information about specific topics, like those above. The keyword cars may have a search volume of a gazillion, but the chance that the searcher who typed it in will find exactly what they’re looking for is slim to nil. And besides, if you want to rank for the search term cars you’d better hire seomoz and pay them a gazillion dollars, cause that’s the only way you’ll get it.

The reason the searcher probably won’t find exactly what they want is because right now Google is returning 822,000,000 results for the search term cars. That’s a lot of websites for the searcher to weed through. This is where researching and optimizing for the long tail search becomes necessary.

Cars is a root word. When we start adding to it and making it a two, three, four… word phrase we begin to discover the Long Tail of cars:

• cheap cars
• cheap italian cars
• purple vw bug cars
• used cars san francisco california
• hybrid cars
• where to buy a hybrid car
• You see where I’m going with this?

This is the information searchers are looking for, they want specifics. Deliver specifics. The way to bring targeted traffic to your website is to optimize for the long tail search terms. These are the terms that have the best chance of accomplishing your bottom line, of attracting the searcher who wants exactly what you offer.

As the tail gets longer, the search volume decreases, but the ability to list for the keyword phrase increases and the chance of making the sale also increases.

Recap:

• Searchers want specific information (there are obviously exceptions)
• The long tail keywords are the specifics of root keywords
• Optimizing for the long tail brings targeted traffic to your website

The long tail is yours – go grab it!

 

Long Tail Love | Keyword Research

I digg keyword research, it’s totally hot, and what I really digg down deep in my seosoul is the long tail; it’s the heart of Internet research, and for many, seo. Whenever I visit a website and get hung up there for more than a few minutes, one of the first things I do is view their source code. You can do this by right clicking on your screen and clicking “view source code.” I have my own ideas right off the bat of what their keywords consist of, or what they should consist of, and I’m curious if they are utilizing seo.

I can tell right away if they are completely unfamiliar with seo, sorta familiar with seo, or have someone in house or hired an seo expert. The long tail has a lot to do with this.

The first thing I check is the home page source code. If the page doesn’t have a title tag and meta values, I all ready know the situation isn’t good. But if it does and it targets some pretty general terms in the title tag and meta values relating to the specific industry, along with some graphic modifiers, and as always good content (if it didn’t have good content I wouldn’t be there anyways) that’s one thing, but it doesn’t tell me what I really want to know.

You can find out their strategy, if they have one, by viewing the source code of their internal pages. This is where the long tail should be.

Say you’re checking out a website about renewable energy. The home page title tag, meta values and content really focuses on renewable energy, energy conservation, alternative fuel, and the company name (for banding purposes). Good, ok. If you then view the source code of the internal pages, and the title tag and meta values are the same as the home page, they are most likely not aware of or utilizing the long tail.

The long tail is an expansion of the core, root keywords. Individually each carries a significantly lower search volume than the root, but when as many of the long tail words and phrases are utilized, they carry a heavy load as a team.

As an example, long tail keywords of the example above could include and are absolutely not limited to:

• peak oil
• eco homes
• bio fuel
• alternate diesel fuel
• alternative car fuel

There a hundreds more that could be utilized; and each of these could possibly be turned into the main site concept and a long tail developed solely from it. So you see, the long tail is the meat and potatoes of keyword research.

If the long tail keywords are to be utilized properly, they should each support their own page within the site. The title tag, meta values and content should focus on the long tail word, while it always ties itself back in with the main concept of the site.

So as you can see, as an seoer, long tails are totally hot!