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Optimizing Your Keywords by Long Tailing
May 26, 2008
To long tail a keyword is basically to take your typical popular keyword such as “make money online” and make it even more specific i.e “How to make money online as a blogger.” Not only does it laser target what the topic is, but it also becomes cheaper per click. “Make money online” is much more popular then “How to make money online as a blogger” and costs much more per click.
“How to make money online as a blogger” is less popular and costs less, HOWEVER it is much more targeted then “making money online” which can consist of many other things, such as selling on eBay, affiliate marketing, blogging, and a ton of other ways to “make money online.” Therefore the reader that the “How to make money online as a blogger” search term will deliver is much more targeted and more likely to turn into a subscriber, click a relevant ad, or purchase a related product through an affiliate link producing revenue.
Even though the “long tail” keywords bring in less traffic the trick to it is to have your regular popular set of keywords, and then have a separate set of “long tail” keywords such as “How to make money online as a blogger,” that are more specific, targeted and cost less. Have as many of these as you can and watch the enormous traffic you will build from them over time. This “long tail” traffic will convert more and make you more money.
Search-box - Having a search box on your site can have it’s many advantages. Using these on your site will allow you to know what keywords your readers are typing in to find the content that they want. Basically your getting DIRECT FEEDBACK from your readers, they’re handing you over the keywords they use to look for the things that interest them.
Keyword Tools - The use of the Google Keyword Tool is very beneficial in figuring out how popular a keyword is, how many monthly searches it gets, and the competition level of a particular keyword. All of these things lead to great lazer specific keywords that identify your niche perfectly, thus your target audience will find specifically what they are looking for.
Take a Peep At Your Competition: Go over to your top competitors site, and check out their headers, title and meta tag. The work is basically done for you, you can adjust a few things here and there to your likings if you want to tailor it down to fit your niche best. How can you find you competitions headers, title and meta tags? Simple just go to their site, right click any spot on their header, and go to “view source,” note pad should pop up with the sites entire code.
Benefits
By using “long tail” keywords, you can gain many advantages:
High search engine rankings: The “long tail” keywords have much less competition and you will most likely have the highest ranking for the phrase you came up with.
Higher CTR: The point of all of this is that your visitors get to your site for what they’re looking with the actual phrase they type into the search box, and since any “long tail” traffic means they typed in your “long tail” keyword, then these are highly targeted visitors that found exactly what they were looking for and are more likely to convert into a sale, affiliate commission, or an ad click.
Make More Money: The profit produced by the “long tail” keywords will be much more then usual, on top of this more visitors from this traffic will subscribe to your feed, and a lot of them will become return visitors and start to leave comments and add more value to your site.
Using “long tails” will help to boost your traffic and conversion rates by bringing you laser targeted traffic, that found specifically what they were looking for.
Hi Luis,
Very well written and well thought out post.
I’d like to add a little about the Search-Box feature that you spoke about above if you don’t mind.
If you use Wordpress, there is a very cool plug-in that you can use called “Psychic Search”. It’s a plug-in that will display all the search terms that your user types in your search box. You can get it at:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/
Just look in the right sidebar under plug-ins.
Now, back on the subject of long-tail-keywords… Yes…it’s worth doing. You get the added benefit of also listing in the shorter keywords while you maximize the chances of being seen when someone actually types in the longer keyword phrase.
Some bloggers talk about the ineffectiveness of long tail keywords because very little people actually search for these longer terms. Well, even if the search volume is only 30 searches per month, then at least for those 30 searches…YOU are at or near the top of the list. Can’t ask for more targeted traffic than that.
Plus….
Who’s to say that you can’t optimize several pages on your site with long tail keywords and url’s??? I say it’s worth the time to focus on.
Absolutely, It is definitely worth it! Many web-master’s stick to the typical, short, straight to the point search term. The reason for this is because of the large amount of traffic they drive. But only a small percentage ends up converting, (depending on the niche) and great results are rarely achieved.
Long tailing ensures that whatever amount of traffic the “long tail” keywords do deliver, they will be targeted, high quality traffic that is much more likely to convert. The combination of both in my opinion is key.
And thank you very much, I was not aware of such a plug-in and is actually very helpful. I am going to put it to use as it will save me some time. I also stumbled upon a few other very interesting plug-ins through the link you provided, Thanks a lot! It is highly appreciated.