Hi, I have a list of keyword ( word1 + word2) but also a long tail keywords (word1 word2 word3 word4). I need to determine which would be the easiest group of words that I could grow in google search. I tried searching on google.com "word1 word2" or "word1 word2 word3" and see how many pages have the targeted keywords. Is it correct?
Of course, go for the long tail keywords, for checking competition, you can search in Google like "your keyword" with "".. And lesser competitive pages are good. There is one more sign to check competition is checking top ten sites in Google and checking their strength, their page rank, their on-page optimization ability etc.
In recent days our website has too little orders, then I check my keywords page rank, lots of the keywords rank droped, I don't know what happened, I make about 60-80links every day for all the keywords, but not all of the links will index by google, and all the links are made by hand, to articles or blogs, why the rank drop? and how to solve this problem?
Long tail keywords are better for affiliate marketing and some other adsense related niches. But they are not very accurate when it comes to brand sites IMHO.
you can see in SE how many pages are targeted on that keywords, try to use majesticseo or something like that Try add keyword research tool also too see the competition
Long tail keywords have to face less competition therefore you can get better position in search results also they attract more targeted audience.
You are right generally long tail keywords are less competitive keywords and they are targeted keywords too. But some long tail keywords should also have competition so check each long tail keyword carefully and go with the less competitive keywords.