Some marketing and SEO experts advocate when doing keyword research to seek out and use long tail keywords for easier and quicker ranking in the search engines. Often the teaching assumes knowledge in that the reader or listener understands what a long tail keyword is, unfortunately this is not always so.

In this video the narrator gives a very easy to understand explanation of what a long tail keyword actually is. Not only does he explain what the long tail means but he also gives you two different strategies to take advantage of those keywords.

The narrator begins by explaining how the long tail relates to search volume and competition; using a graph he illustrates the concept very clearly.

He slots in keywords explaining that the high search volume and high competition keywords, those keywords are often called the ‘head’ keywords. Moving further down the tail of the curve we find keywords with lower search volume and less competition, these are called the ‘long tail keywords’.

An interesting point is that high competition keywords or the ‘head’ keywords are not necessarily a key term of only one word, in fact it can be made up of a few.

Although you can rank quicker for the long tail keywords, understand you will not get as much traffic as you would do with a more competitive phrase though. However you can use them to benefit greatly in your websites… the small niche sites or authority sites as suggested by the narrator.

The 2 ways to profit from long tail keywords and they are…

Small Niche Websites
Find a long tail keyword, register the exact match domain and build a website surround that particular keyphrase, with ten or twenty articles about the topic. Here you are likely to rank well because the domain name has the keyword in it and the website is totally focused on a small topic. This can give you the advantage over larger sites that might just gloss over the surface of a topic as they spread themselves wider in contrast to you who are lazer focused.

Authority Site
Target one particular phrase or keyword but further down the long tail graph about mid level competition… he does not recommend going for the high competition. You will make this an authority site with a hundred maybe 200 articles or more, instead of maybe 10 or 20 articles of the small niche website. The trick here is that you target a primary keyword for your domain but for each of the articles on an authority site you would target a smaller long tail keyword.

Because you have more articles you are in a good position to target keywords with fewer searches, because each article will bring in a small number of visitors, however it all adds up and the more articles or posts you add the more visitors you will attract.

Watch this informative video for further explanation about long tail keywords. You can also find more information about The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

 

 

 

Filed under: Keyword Search

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