I've got a niche website that I've established for a while now. It's so-so as far as monetization (between adsense and affiliates, maybe $300 per month). It's ranked #3 for my main keyword phrase out of 1.2MM. I want to tap into the other keywords, and eventually the long-tail keywords (LTKs). I've already identified about 500 long-tail keyword phrases. My question is, how do I actually 'implement' these keyword phrases? I'm guessing that I might create a page for each LTK named like www.domain.com/long-tail-keyword-phrase.htm and have the LTK in the title, and in an h1 header, and maybe mentioned two or three times in the content. And then make some content that will probably be similar across all 500 of these LTK pages, but be tweaked a little bit, but will make sense as far as the LTK goes (so it doesn't look odd to the readers). Then have navigation links that take them to the rest of my site as normal. Is that the right approach? Am I missing something? Do I have to have internal links from the rest of my site pointing at the LTKs for them to actually be indexed and rank well? Should I create a sitemap.xml with all the pages once I'm done? Thanks!
Does doing what you propose give anything of value to your visitors? Or is it simply the same information recycled 500 times? Regardless, you will need links to those pages from somewhere, for them to be indexed.
The value is in them finding the site. So the site had good, real, valuable content. But there's a lot of competition (much of it garbage) for the main keywords. So, the value would be in that when they search a specific key phrase, they actually find my site. The idea is that the LTK pages would be 'landing' pages for them to find in SEs. Instead of one main index page that everyone comes to (which then lets them navigate into the site for all the content), there would be hundreds of custom landing pages that are tuned specifically for the LTKs. Say, for example, that my site was about taxidermy (totally made-up example). My main content is all about the history of taxidermy, how to do your own taxidermy, supplier reviews, a message forum on taxidermy (lol), how to properly care for your mounted deer head, etc. And let's say that for the search phrase "mounted deer head", I come out in the top 3 out of millions. But for 'do-it-yourself taxidermy', I come out #90 out of millions, with the top 89 all being various junk pages/blogs, etc., that are all trying to sell an affiliate taxidermy product, and not offering any real answers on how to do your own taxidermy. The value for the searcher would be that they could actually get the answers for their question at my 'how to do your own taxidermy' page, but that's not how they phrased the question. So do I just take my 'how to do your own taxidermy' section, copy it, rename it 'do it yourself taxidermy', SE optimize it for that phrase, and have it nestle into the rest of the site? And repeat that for 'd-i-y taxidermy', 'taxidermy myself', etc.? Ok, strange example, but I hope that I'm getting the point across. There are hundreds of LTKs that I'd love searchers to find and use to land at my site. Just wondering what the best practices are to actually leverage those LTKs. Does that make sense?
im trying to learn how to target these long tail keywords aswell since there usually is not as much competition for them.. I am fairly new to SEO, so my question is how many people is to many for me to be competing with for one keyword? I am trying to get my site indexed over time and get some good traffic from search engines but I do not want to compete with so many people that I will never make into the top 10.. Im looking to hit the mid range keywords for my niche and gain the market for them..