I'm doing some keyword research and have a little dilemma. Can someone please shed some light for me? This is just an example, but it's close enough to the issue. Let's say I have a site that offers free music downloads. when I check google's keyword tool, I see that the phrase download music has over 3mil hits/month. The phrase free download music . Since the shorter phrase is within the longer phrase, should I just optimize for the longer phrase? Should I build two separate pages... what works best here? thanks!
Keywords can be split into two main groups, short tail keywords and long tail keywords, or broad keywords and narrow keywords. When you compare the two keywords, short one gets far more searches each month. But, also more competitive! So, we should learn to benefit from the long tail keyword. There is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords but anybody(!) can rank for long tail keywords.
Thanks for the thought through reply! But, to clarify, if I were to optimize for "fried red snapper", would that also help rankings for the broad phrases "fried snapper" and "red snapper", or would it have little effect? Meaning, would it be better for me to create pages focused on each of these phrases separately, or does it work to optimize a single page for long tail phrases, and broader ones as well? thanks again!
In your case, go with the latter ("free music downloads"). Not only is it more relevant, but it's also (somewhat) better targeted.
I'm sorry for being vague, I have a site which already has high placement on several high competition, high traffic two word key phrases. Two in particular, account for about 70% of my site's traffic. Honestly, I'm new to SEO and have no idea how my site got this high ranking, other than it's been up since 2001. Nonetheless, it's up there. About a year ago, I wondered if I could get even higher on the page by changing a few words around. I made the change and within a few weeks I managed to jump up to the #2 position on both phrases. I recently added a new section to my site, and find that I've slid down on both phrases. Net result is, I get about the same traffic. Less on the two big phrases driving traffic, but a whole bunch of longer tail phrases are now generating traffic. All in all, it's good news, because even with the same traffic, I'm getting more affiliate conversions. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to structure my site, so I maintain the #2 or 3 spot on the two big phrases that I had a few months ago, but ADD the new long tail phrases.w
You always want to go for the longtailed phrases first. At my company, we refer to it as picking the low-hanging fruit first, it's easier, and you start to see the benefits of SEO right away. It's easier to rank for 5 or 6 longtailed terms than it is to rank for one highly competitive phrase. In time, one your site establishes some authority and gets some "natural" links, you won't have to work quite as hard for the more competitive stuff (IMHO)..