wat i do is usually get a list of all my keywords(single competitive words) and then make 3 words long tail keywords by clubbing them, then i select 1-2 long tail keywords which makes more sense to me.
Hm well the people who search for me tell give me new ideas for long tail keywords...I look up on stat counter what keywords people use to find my site and take it from there...
Not to make this sound like adevertising but http://www.hittail.com will help you discover long tail keywords in a method similar to what ez-online-money suggested.
trafficnotice thanks for the link... hittail looks really useful for keeping track of long tail data coming in...I just installed it on one of my sites - will give some feedback in a bit for anyone that's interested.
Hittail is great for discovering long tail keywords that you're already getting traffic from. This will essentially tell you what keywords to focus some of your marketing efforts on.
IMO it doesn't make a lot of sense spending a ton of time researching and optimizing content for long-tail terms. Don't get me wrong, long-tail terms are vital. Spend your time developing content and the long-tail terms will fall into place.
HitTail takes away the research, so you can spend more of your time on writing well. All it does is assure that you'll get the traffic ASAP. You're not optimizing your content, so much as optimizing the order in which you attack the "pockets" of untapped traffic that surround you--so close that you're almost already getting the hits today... but aren't.
I just started using hittail and it is awesome. Not only can you see what sites people come from but what terms they search for to find your site. Then there is the whole long tail list
Planning your content is important especially if the industry you're fluttering around in is a good money-maker. Guesswork may work, but focus is better. Remember that not all long-tail keywords are the same, they all hold different value. For example, "buy sony a2 speakers online" would be much more lucrative to capture than "sony a2 speakers info online". There's lots of lucrative long-tail keywords out there that webmasters pay little attention to.
I simply do a normal keyword research. Personally, I like the keyword tool in SEOBOOK dot com because it lets me select the country where the bulk of my visitors are coming from. Then from there, I select the long-tail keywords which have high conversion potential (i.e.limousine rental orlando)
If you are trying to rank high for 3 or 4 word keyword phrases try to find words that get at least 500 or more searches a month and then do a check on Google for each phrase in quotes "keyword phrase" and you will see how many pages are optimised for your chosen phrase. It is easier to target 10 phrases with 500-1000 searches a month than 1 with 50000 or more.
Has anyone ever used wordze? What do you guys think of it for the long tail? IS it really just an advanced wordtracker/keyworddiscovery/overture-type tool that can only show you the existing/popular keywords?
Here are some results from Wordze's search data that I downloaded and saved on my blog for you. 10,000 keywords for "myspace": http://www.boogybonbon.com/wp-content/uploads/myspace.xls 2,385 keywords for "myspace layouts": http://www.boogybonbon.com/wp-content/uploads/myspace-layouts.xls One of 40 typo keyword sets for "myspace"(44 typo keywords): http://www.boogybonbon.com/wp-content/uploads/myspace-typo1.xls In all you will find that you get top search, as well as, long tail keywords from Wordze fairly quickly. It took me all of 2 minutes to download them keywords and post it to this forum for you. Wordze is really fast IMO! ps.. right click and save link as if one of the files dont auto download for you.
I also use hittail and it gives me more long tail keyword to target. It is a good tool that is worth to use.