Long Tail Keywords
Posted by Administrator (admin) on Thursday, 27th March, 2008 at 7:35 PM
Affiliate Business Basics >>

What is the "Long tail"?

Briefly, the "long tail" is the result of a search engine querry that outputs tens of  hundreds of keywords and keyword phrases that a website can be found for - but because they are not  the most popular keyword term, they are largely overlooked by "would be" website developers.

The basic premise behind the use of long tail keywords is the flip side to what most people typically consider keyword optimization. An astute webmaster will tune a website for the  "long tail" by focusing primarily on a handful of keywords that a website can be found for, rather than for the top keyword search terms. This simply means that a webmaster with a lot of experience knows that a website is more likely to receive most of their search engine visitors through a variety of low-volume search queries instead of by major keywords, which are typically very difficullt to rank for anyway.

You read that correctly - the main and most popular keywords are not the emphasis in this approach.

Here is an illustration: Lets say we have the Major Keyword ‘Credit Cards‘. This keyword phrase would be considered the general keyword topic and long tail keywords within this niche includes keyword phrases such as the following:

    * credit cards for people with poor credit
    * best low interest credit cards
    * pros and cons of small business credit cards
    * good canadian credit cards for students

Instead of the keyword phrase, ‘Credit Cards‘, the LTK approach would be to optimize for the subordinate terms as in the example list. This is a very powerful bit of information, and optimizing your site and creating content to match these search queries will be much more productive because it allows you to optimize for actual querries that use those terms. Yes, they are fewer, but they are very targeted.

Long tail keywords have grown in prominence primarily because the internet user has become more sophistocated. They have learned that some terms are much too broad to give them the results they are after, and so they have learned to narrow their search terms to filter for more precise results. The wonderful thing about this is that the Major Search Engines collect all search related queries that people make from around the world, and that information is readily available for use by such programs as Micro Niche Finder. With a tool such as this, you can enter the main topic - the Major Keyword - and the software will look through a mound of data, and  in a moment, return all instances of the Long Tail Keywords that you would be able to use to optimize your website for. This would be a nearly impossible undertaking if done by hand.

In our next segment, we will do a typical search on a major topic and take a look at the Long tail Keywords. We'll then demonstrate how to optimize fron the long tail keyword approach. If you can't wait for the upcoming segment, you can see a few examples and videos done by the makers of Micro Niche Finder which gives some useful tips an various methodologies that you can engage in to get a feel for long tail keyword use.