Hello everyone! I have done alot of reading here and learning tons...what a great place. Anyway, I would love some thoughts on long tail keywords. It appears that the goal is to have a decent amount of searches without a ton of competition. My question is how long is too long? I do not want any of my articles or blog post to appear spammy. I just want to provide good content...although I have seen some pretty looooooong keywords when searching different places. Is this a common sense item? Thanks in advance... Todd
The longer your keyword phrase, the less searches - so the problem should be self regulating. Popular phrases may have 4 or 5 words - but I'd be surprised if there's enough traffic to make it worthwhile targetting longer phrases - unless you have tools or want to spend the time creating 1000's of keywords with just a few searches each.
It does not matter if it's 3 or 5 word it depends on how many people are searching for that keyword and what it's competition is.
If the purpose is to find long tail keywords for exact match domains, 3 - 5 words within the keyword is the norm. However, if you are trying to rank deep links you should include all words within reason.
Upon my research till now with keywords i find anything beyond 4 terms i.e., 5 terms plus may be a too long keyword. Would like to see whats the observation with others
A maximum of 4 is ok. But sometimes there are people who cannot find their needed result and then they suddenly try a keyword search with more than 4. For example "best watch manufacturer in US".
4 should be OK. *Intent* can be much more important- think about what a person is looking for when they type in a phrase like that. If it means they want to buy (if you're site is about selling something) - then sure it may have less searches than another keyword but you will be targeting people that actually want to buy.
Long tailed keywords will have much less competition therefore it will be easy for you to rank for them quickly. Short tailed keywords have much larger competition therefore you would have to do more work in order to rank for them. Generally 3-4 word keywords are enough for me. The longer they get the less searches you will get so it wouldn't be really really worth it.
You have to balance competition against the number of searches. As you add words the volume of searches will drop, as does the competition.
It depend on how much searches happend on keyword per day, week and month only then you will be able to analyze the real traffic graphs.