Although blogging is often looked at as a simple task, there are several issues that arise and steps any blogger must follow in order to compose a blog that Internet surfers actually would have interest in. With so many little issues to manage, many bloggers become overwhelmed, and when they look at the results for all their time spent, the are left dissatisfied. The traffic just doesn’t show.
So that is why we are going to talk about the practice of using long tail keywords in order to show better with the search engines. And while this practice is basically the same as research for Keywords and Phrases, properly placed long tail keywords can open up new traffic doors, as long as the competition is low. Of course this means the amount of traffic from those long tail keywords will be less, it is still better than no traffic at all.
But before we discuse long tail keywords in detail, I think it is key to make sure we are all on the same page regarding keywords. So what are keywords exactly?
Keywords are words that Google picks up on to determine search engine results. What this means is, Google and all other search engines have tools called spiders, spiders crawl websites and blogs and anything else they can find on the web. They use the sites URL, Description, Titles, and Content to determine how to classify a specific website.
And what this means to a beginner blogger is, that if your blog is not focused or cannot be classified by search engines, the search engines will not know what to do with it. It may appear in random searches that has little or nothing to do with what the actual blog is about. This will result in very poor traffic. And this is something we as bloggers usually want to avoid. As a blogger, we have the unique ability to create keyword rich articles that search engines can easily spot.
And with that being said, we can now talk about long tail keywords. Single or two word keywords and phrases like Money, or Loans or Football are killers. Try searching those types of keywords in Google and you will get some real strong websites. Chances of a little old blog to show up for keywords like that are almost non-existent, but never fear, this is where long tail keywords work for our blogs.
Let’s looks at a simple example. Say you want your blog to be about Vacation Destinations. If you search Google for that Keyword phrase, what do you see?
You see some strong websites. Some really established websites that have been around, that carry a high PR and have great popularity. Here are the Top 5 results
Vacationidea.com
Expedia.com
Luxuryresorts.com
Travelwiththekids.about.com
And
Cheapflights.com
These are all PR 4 and 5 websites. And something that as bloggers we would like to stay away from. But, that does not mean we do not want to include this primary keyword phrase within our blog title or post titles, or randomly placed within our blogs.
But what it does mean is that at this time it is not focused enough for you as a blogger to be competitive. But what can you do? You can dig deeper
“Michigan Vacation Destinations”
Let’s see what we end up with.
Michigan-vacation-destination.com
Michigan-vacation-destination.com/
Michigan.org
Detroit.about.com
Tripadvisor.com
These are a little more reasonable, with michigan.org being the only PR over 5 the others are PR2 & PR3
But we can still go deeper.
“Northern Michigan Vacation spots”
You see here, I added northern and I changed destination to spot. I did this because it was auto generated by Google, meaning it is viewed as a viable keyword.
Here is where you want to be
When you look at the results, all the sites are PR3 or lower and there is only about 112,000 results from the search.
Google’s keyword tool only says that this long tail keyword is searched 46 times per month. But if you break it down like this, your odds are better. Especially with search engines that will auto fill the search box as you go along
Northern Michigan is searched over 200,000 times a month
Northern Michigan Vacation is searched 3,600 times
And your long tail keyword is searched 46
This gives you a pretty ranging audience, and even though your competition in the beginning will only be with the full longtail keyword, with time and blog maturity and heaps of backlinks, you can start to compete with the higher searched keywords.
This is why long tail keywords can be so critical if you have any expectations of ever being popular. This does not mean that as soon as you add a certain set of words you will be indexed for them, not at all, it is a process, you need keyword density and you will need lots of content before Google will even consider your blog as relevant.
But start with small fish, and build. A little traffic will always be better than no traffic. Especially in the beginning.
For realistic recommendations in the sphere of free traffic – please read the publication. The times have come when proper info is truly within your reach, use this chance.
