Can anyone explain why examining long tail keywords is important? It doesn't make sense to me. I use HitTail to get the list of long tail keywords, but if I'm collecting this list of keywords to target that is driving traffic to my site, why do I need to target them? THEY'RE ALREADY DRIVING TRAFFIC TO ME! I need the list of keywords that my site DOESN'T have!
Here's one you may not be targetting: "pink blancmange". I wouldn't even try to target "long tail" key phrases. Simply writing your content naturally should inadvertently target long tail phrases. If you use a keyword research tool to find "short tail" phrases, you know that the trend implies they will be searched for (in volumes) in the future. If you find a short tail phrase using your tool, that small number of searches may have neen one-offs that are never searched for again. I would use a keyword tool to research subject areas so you know what's popular but as far as targeting specific short tail phrases I just wouldn't bother. But that's just me
I think there is a key point that is being missed. If the long tail keyword has decent usage, but you rank poorly, then it is pointing out a phrase that you should rank better for. Why? Because somebody was wanted the information you have so badly that they went all the way down the SERP's to find your page. How much traffic is available at the top of the first page of SERP's? How poor are the sites that caused the person to keep on looking? Does the phrase identify a sub-niche that you could develop? It certainly isn't automatic, but long tails can be a good source of ideas. They deserve researching to see whether they represent an opportunity that nobody else has covered.
I think the word target makes you a bit confusing. You should have to optimize and maximize. Say you know you get some traffic for a certain long tail keyword. You need to see if the traffic from that long tail is maximize. What Hittail gives you is some hint some the long tail keywords you may need to optimize for. So if you see a long tail keyword in hittail, then what you can do is 1. to see if you can further maximize the traffic from the keyword 2. to see if you can optimize for the keyword
(creator of HitTail speaking) We don't recommend that you target just any keywords. We only suggest targeting ones that appear under the suggestions tab. Why? They're already leading to your site, so why bother? Because they're leading to your site, buried many pages into search, which tells you a couple of things: 1. You probably didn't deliberately target that term. It's only that one user who was desperate enough to dig deep into the SERPs who saw you--not the potentially dozens more per day who are actually searching on it. 2. You CAN be found on that term. 3. There are many pages that didn't satisfy that searcher above you. Hypothetically speaking, if they had to dig say 5 pages to reach you, you could save them a lot of time by just being on the first page of results. When you repeat this process regularly, you can bring in a lot of traffic you weren't bringing in before. A couple of days ago, I posted on the phrase "get web hits" and before that, "driving traffic for less". Whereas before, we were getting some of the traffic on these terms, now we're probably getting all of it.
Im new to all this and never heard of this until reading this thread, but I have to ask if your using words in your metatags that have nothing to do with the content of the page.. is that not going to defeat the object and get you a lower return.. as I understand google goes for the metatags and checks the content and if your tags don't relate to the page content, you get a lower score for that page. Mike
" as I understand google goes for the metatags and checks the content and if your tags don't relate to the page content, you get a lower score for that page. " I agree but at the same time what if you are the only one for that keyword then you get searched.
Not using adsence I guess I differ from most on the net (ok google banned me) another long story. But the same time I don't think it's relevent to use keywords to acctract vistors with missleading metatags that have nothing to do with the page content. I know I would never trust a website thats does this, If I can't find the content from my chosen keyword search string I have entered.. to me thats a waste of time and deffo a site to give a miss in the future. so you may get one visit but we want repeat traffic not just one visit.. Keeping your tags in keeping with the page content, and if your wanting to target a word have a page with content that contains text relating to that keyword. What has cars got to do with rubber chickens ??? Mike
mikeinlincs, long tail keywords are extended, more focused variations of your main keywords. So your main keyword may be hotels, and a long tail keyword would be 4 star hotel with wireless internet. The reason they work is that they are highly relevent, content based keywords, not just random terms unrelated to the site. Long tail keywords are usually picked up from the main content on your page, not the meta tags, and could be a term you never thought you would get traffic from. They give great traffic because you can rank top 5 for loads and loads of these type of terms, and they are also producing very targetted visitors. Another factor, is if the visitor has gone through say 5 SERPs to find you, the pages above you must not be giving visitors what they are looking for. Ideally you need to get a good amount of statistics from your site, over a month or two, then start analysing how any are coming in on what keywords. Then check the rank of the page they are coming in on, and promote it directly (a $3 social bookmarking service is great for these internal pages) Hope that helps mate DD
In my opinion, people use keywords to search for information they want and this search option is about giving control to the user. It allows the user to define exactly what they are looking for rather than scrawl and search from a list of all the stuffed thing. It takes a lot of effort to do this and of course need to work on it more as there is not hard and fast rule. Hence, efforts on understanding customers, target customers, offering, proposition, competitors and so on is the thumb-rule.
Sure kool002. Go to the services thread here, and seek out people offering social bookmark submission (this guy is really good). You get like 30 accounts (stumbleupon, digg, spotback etc) and it usually costs around $3. Its a quick easy way to get traffic and backlinks to internal pages of your site, and usually all thats needed to get a site ranking highly for a long tail keyword.
In my own experience, meta tags aren't worth a crap unless you are looking to give your keywords away to your competition. Only 1990's search engines use them for ranking. In my own experience, long tailed keywords are the only way to optimize. Which do you think is easier? going for 10,000 visitors that are searching for 1 term when you have 1 million sites competing - or - going for 10,000 visitors that are searching for 100,000 phrases when you have only 1000 sites competing for each phrase. If you want to use long tailed keywords and not have to bust your ass writing, learn to program. DB driven sites are by far the most profitable (time vs. income) for natural rankings. 100,000 pages created in 6 hours .. no problem.
Try Long Keywords if there is very high competition on main keywords of your website. Long tail keywords are useful in this case to rank your site well early in search engines.