The Power Of Long-Tail Keywords
May 28th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
If you’ve never heard of the term ‘long-tail keywords’, you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth I’m talking about. It is a search engine optimisation (SEO) term which implies that you shouldn’t just target one or two extremely competitive and searched for terms, but should go for a variety of less popular keywords. It’s better to be on page one of the search engine results for four less popular keywords than it is to be on page four for a highly popular keyword phrase. An example is targeting “Web Design Newcastle” and “Web Design North East” etc instead of just “Web Design”. For the same amount of effort you’ll get much better rankings. Here’s how you can target these long-tail keyword phrases…
The diagram on the right shows an example of long-tail keywords in practice – for example although we get a proportion of our traffic for the competitive keyword phrase ‘web designers’, we get a lot more traffic combined from other less popular keyword phrases. There are various methods of targeting these long-tail keywords, either directly or indirectly.
You can target less popular keyword phrases directly by utilising search engine optimising techniques for the page, such as making sure the phrase appears in the title tag and on the body of the web page. You can also build the amount of inbound links to that page that contain the keyword phrase in the anchor text, boosting your link popularity and rankings for that phrase.
As many search engine optimisers espouse, ‘content is king’ – the more text-rich content you have on your website, the more potential visitors the search engines will pass to you. Provide guides around your subject, write articles, and as long as you stick to a relevant theme or topic then you will start to get visitors that use search terms you won’t ever have thought of. If you check your website statistics log to see what keyword phrases people have used to enter your site, you’re sure to be surprised, and will probably be amused when you see what some people type in!
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2 Comments »
October 15th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Hi,
Thanks for this article. If we are looking to promote Open Your Diary, how would you suggest we create a reasonable set of long tail keywords? Should we use these in page content or as a basic for our google ads? Should we look at creating a range of landing pages, each with the keywords in place?
rgds/alex
October 16th, 2008 at 9:33 am
You’re welcome, glad you found it useful! Regarding long-tail keywords, you can quickly create lists of related phrases by using the Google Adwords keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This should generate some ideas (not all will be long-tail necessarily). As an example, for your website ‘online booking’ or ‘online diary’ would be quite a generic phrase (and probably highly competitive). You could then think of hundreds of related longer keyword phrases such as ‘online booking system’, ‘online booking software’, ‘online availability software’ etc…
Hope that helps!