Shawn ManaherI am very excited to help you learn about long tail keywords and the many benefits of targeting them. With the web growing in leaps and bounds, and as civilization becomes connected to the web in the remote corners of the Earth, it becomes more difficult to compete with keyword phrases in any search engine. If you have been putting off launching your own website or providing daily web content to your visitors, now is the time to take advantage of these longer search queries. A long tail keyword gives you the ability to rank well and rank fast. In
Keyword Differences
the diagram below, you will see the difference between a keyword, a keyword phrase and a long tail keyword. For the sake of simplicity, I am defining each separately with a clear distinction.
From the screen capture, you now know that a long tail keyword contains more than two words, it is longer than a phrase, and it is almost a complete sentence. You might be thinking, “Do people actually search this way?” Actually, they do–a recent case study was done by an online ad network called Chitika, and they found…
How many words does it take to get to the center of good search traffic? According to a new study by online ad network Chitika, three – as in, three-word search queries drive the most traffic from search engines.
Here is look at the ‘traffic by word count graph’ they provided…
Learning Long Tail Keywords
According to that graph, it puts long tail keywords as one of the most prominent ways to market your website.
An older study conducted on Dec 21, 2000, that can be found at the Journal of American Society called ‘Searching the Web: The Public and Their Queries’, looked at queries performed in Excite. They found that…
The average length of a search query was 2.4 terms.
Two separate case studies with similar results over an extended time period should be enough to convince you that optimizing websites for 3 and 4 word search queries can help you drive traffic to your website.
How easy is to rank for three word queries? Rather simple. I just launched a website last week that contains a rather high profile long tail keyword. I already rank on the top listing in the second page of Google. Mind you, with only a little work I can supersede much of my competition by pointing relevant web content to that website, which will drive me to the first page. The great part is that I did not even submit that website to Google to be indexed.
If you not taking advantage of long tail keywords by now, this column should give you enough proof to rethink your website optimizing strategy. If you are interested in learning more on this subject, please leave a reply. I would be more than happy to help with your questions and concerns.