What are Long Tail Keywords and What Good are They?

Good question, I'm glad I asked!

Long tail keywords are keywords phrases with several words in them - like 4 or more words.

For example, we could try to optimize the keyword "website design" but there's way too much competition for that. Instead, we optimize for "website design madison wi" which is what people are typing into search engines and a better match for us for the kind of clients that we want.

One cool way to do this optimization is blogging. Here's an example - we rank #1 for "us commerce association scam" because I blogged about that once - no wait, twice I think. Ok, that's not exactly the traffic we want but we'll take the traffic. A better example is "email logos" because we do offer that design service.

So what you want to do is look over your logs and website statistics. See what phrases people are typing in to get to your site. It's fun to do and you'll be amazed.

Here's an example of one we can work on: "post jobs on your website." People are searching for that and I blogged about that once. We've gotten a few calls about it, so we know it's something people are looking for. We'd create more content about that service we offer. It would be original content that's good and informative but leaves some questions so that they call us and want to find out more. We'd then do our magic of setting up more links with that text around the Web as well as on our website. See what I did there? I've made all the phrases listed here links to where that can be found. The "click here" (I didn't link that one) hyper text (link text) is wrong. Do not write copy that way and do not make links that way. You want to use keywords for your link text. If I've got a page that has 100 links to it that mostly use a certain keyword, then search engines are going to think that that page has something to do with that keyword. Get it?

If you want more info or help with optimizing your website for long tail keywords, let us know. The cool thing is, you're already getting some traffic with those keywords, so you don't have to do a lot to own that keyword. Do that for 10-20 long tail keywords and that can be some significant traffic. Not bad.

-Tony

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