SERP Domination - 4,785 Page 1 Rankings in 14 Days!

Ok now i have your attention with the marketing style title, let me say i'm not selling anything because you couldn't afford me and yes the above statement is true so read on.

Long Tail
What i wanted to post about is Long Tail, and how people completely ignore it or underestimate the power of picking up Long Tail search terms. For those who don't know what Long Tail terms are, these are simply very specific search terms and generally have 4-5 or more words and little competition. An example is instead of ranking for the search term "Canon Camera" which has stiff competition, you would break it down and target a page for "Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Camera" and another page for "Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera" and so on until you have sewn up the Canon Camera line.

Benefits
The benefits of this are numerous. Firstly i will say too many people get caught up trying to rank for "the big one" and loose sight of the bigger picture. Sure it's a nice trophy saying i rank page #1 for "SEO Company" or i rank page #2 for the holy grail "SEO" (which i do) however it does take quite a bit of time and effort to achieve those types of placements then you have to maintain them.

What happens when you wake up tomorrow and Google has decided to tweak something and it negatively effects your prized term? You are history, your traffic dries up, all your hard work is undone, your income collapses and you waste days, weeks or sometimes months trying to recover your term. You have a single point of failure that's not in your complete control.

Using Long Tail diversifies your traffic sources, you no longer have to rely on a single rank but have multiple ways for visitors to find you via the SERP's. On any given day some Long Tail keywords will drop and others will rise which is completely normal flux but overall your traffic won't be effected.

The other benefit with optimizing for Long Tail terms is your traffic will be "highly" targeted and more likely to convert in to a sale. Consumers have a reasonable idea what they are looking for and generally sculpt specific terms. If they are looking for a Canon Camera it's highly unlikely they will just Google "Canon Camera" unless they are looking for the Canon official website. They will know a few basics on what they want such as a Digital with 8 MegaPixels so are more likely to type "Canon 8 MegaPixel Digital Camera".

Right there you have a highly targeted term that's very likely to get queries and convert with minimal competition (216,000) you can rank for quite easily.

On page your Title holds the most bang for your buck, so by splitting your pages down and targeting Long Tail terms you have multiple bites of the Apple with the Title tool at your disposal on many pages giving you more chances to rank.

Result
Anyhow this is getting long and i have a few things to do so i'll finish up by showing a site i optimized for Long Tail about 2 weeks ago. As you can see by the traffic graph up until the 13th Dec traffic was ordinary, on the night of the 14th, the 15th and a few hours on the 16th the rise in the graph was me on the site making pages and optimizing things. 3 days later Google started to deliver and traffic went through the roof. (The yellow columns are visitors and stats aren't updated for the rest of the 27th)



And this one is the referring search phrases mainly from Google, and a bit from Yahoo/MSN. I've blocked the terms to hide the niche, but as you can see the site was found with 5,982 different search terms. Going by the stats that only 80% of searchers go to the second page it equals 4,785 page #1 placements all long tail.



Now the interesting thing is the top 10 search terms only account for 1.3% of the total traffic meaning 98.7% is long tail. Many people don't realize this, but your top 10 terms only account for a small percentage of your referring terms. I'd like everyone to check the percentage of visitors their top 10 terms bring in and post them, if it's 30% that means 70% is coming from Long Tail yet people fail to take advantage of it!

Hope you found this interesting and learnt something useful.

 

I did. Thnx

 

Good post mate, I also like targeting long tailed, it seems to work especially well if you are running a retail site.

 

Good post, I also prefer long tail. Titles are the most important thing, I try to include a number of things. If I was doing a camera I might do - "Sony cybershot camera review" This way I could rank for cybershot camera, cybershot camera review, sony camera review and the list goes on.

long tail ftw!!

 

Excellent post it is true people sometimes lose sight of this me included.

 

Nice read, makes me consider another approach. Thanks

 

Well, you did it again. You gave me some useful information.

Questions:

1- When focusing on long tails, does that mean that my <h1> is the long tail (ie. sony handycam 8100), the page title, and the page url (ie. www dot mysite dot com / sony-handycam-8100)? Is this correct?

2- On this site that you optimized, how many pages did they have indexed to get these results? Is the number of pages indexed a relevant factor for serp?

3- Did you do anything for backlinks for this site, or is this totally from creating pages with long tailed keywords in mind? In other words, were these results solely from on site seo?

Thanks mate. I wish I could afford you. Seriously.

:O)

 

very nice... i've learn from this post..

 

Great post and I agree completely. I pretty much only focus on long tail keywords these days. The main keywords are taken care of within them anyway.

 

Excellent, i see alot of people struggling to rank and obtain visitors hence this write up. The beauty of it is you don't need years of experience to rank for long tail terms and it's something achievable to everyone no matter what the niche or skill level.

Yes spot on. If you use your long tail term as the Title, as the heading with H1 or H2 tags and a few times in the document body you are will on your way to page one. Couple that with a few backlinks to that specific page using your long tail as anchor and you should have things sewn up.

Yes and no, alot of pages can both help and hinder a site and this is why. If you have more pages, in general you will need more incoming links to help index and rank your deep pages. Think of it like this, an incoming PR5 link is like a jug of water. If your site has 10 pages (10 cups) your jug will pour a fair bit of juice in to each one.

Now if your site is 1,000 pages, your jug of water will only put a few drops of juice in to each glass so you will need alot more jugs of water to full those 1,000 cups to the same lever.

On the other hand alot of pages helps if you have a good internal linking structure and make use of internal anchor text. On the footer you can have Copyright DigitalPoint and a 1,000 page site will provide more anchor weight to your home page with your best keyword. Also on every page in your article content, link to 2 or 3 of your other pages that are related using good anchor text. It provides big benefits to the SERP's as well as to your visitor. the W3C.org is a brilliant example of this.

I also done deep links to strategic places within the site to speed things up a bit and linked up pages better internally. So it was 95% onpage and about 5% offpage. I got i think about 20 new links, and all went to major subpages.

Thanks.

 

Sweet,

Man, send me a bill when I can afford to pay it. lol

Your response was awesome. Thanks so much.

:O)

 

No problems, just read a lot and experiment with everything you read and you will learn. The results i showed are only 2 weeks in, it will be another 4 weeks before they fully kick in.

 

wow.

Thanks for the post. Long tails are such and obvious thing and easy to do but I totally ignored it without a second thought.

Your right dude and thanks again for reminding me of this easy method.

Ive learnt alot from your post.

 

Thank you, very inspiring and good information.
I was aware of it, never gave it that much importance but so true. Green rep!

 

Thanks a lot for a great read!

Gave me something to work on tomorrow - internal linking, as well as something to have in mind for future sites.

Oh, and today I got 300 uniques on a new website (6 days old) from long tailed keywords alone (I'm still trying for the big one, but only on page 7th at the moment). A great way to find these keywords is using the external adwords keywords research tool!

 

Nice post. This is infact true.

Kingdom

 

what is this EXTERNAL ADWORDS KEYWROD RESEARCH TOOL??

 

Yes, internal linking is "very" important and overlooked by alot of people. I've seen people go out and buy say PR4 links and the whole time they have PR4 pages on their own site and don't make use of them.

Internal links are great for both the user and Google for indexing and ranking your site.

Excellent, well done 300 is a good number for a 6 day old site. A good strategy is to use your Homepage to target the big terms, use your category or major subpages to target medium level terms and your individual post pages to target long tail.

Using my Camera example above, you could do something like...

Homepage > Canon Cameras
Category Page > Canon Digital Cameras
Category Page > Canon SLR Cameras
Individual Page > Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Camera
Individual Page > Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera

Because your Homepage is strongest, use it to target the toughest terms. Your first level Subpages are next strongest so target mid level terms, and your individual post or article pages are weakest so these are best suited to long tail.

Doing it like this makes use of the natural weight of most sites to target the best possible phrases they have a chance to rank for.

Another thing is know your stats back to front, don't just look at Uniques and try and raise this. Also look at things like your Top 5 Exit Pages, visit these pages and find out why people are leaving and rework them to entice visitors to stay on your site.

Look at the Top 5 Entry Pages, find out what makes those pages so special and what's drawing people to them and how. Try and incorporate this aspect in to your poorly performing pages.

With SEO you can never have too many stats.

 

Wow, this article is greatness... a couple of questions to pick away at your brain

On my site as I work on internal linking I have several hundred archived headlines and while I see you point out the importance of the (html?) title tags I'm wonderin if just the H2 tags + "pretty" permalinks which are titles (which will have many long tail keywords) would also suffice.

 

I'm not 100% sure what you mean, each page has a <title> in the head of the document (well it should) and this is what shows in the SERP's and on your browser tab.

Your pages should have the exact term(s) you are targeting in the Title, and this exact term again as a heading as H1 or H2 tags. Also it should be contained in the page content somewhere. If you have CRU's (Content Relevant URL's) then yes definitely try and include them in your URL. Also in the body of your page, turn words in to relevant hyperlinks to your other pages. Or you could have it at the bottom of your article such as "We also discussed other ranking factors in our Search Engine Optimization section."

This way it helps in this case the DP SEO section rank for those keywords and provides visitors with further reading to keep them on the site.