Aim To Rank For Long Tail Keywords
When new bloggers start out writing about their favorite topic, they are excited and just writing away. They then start to investigate why they don’t really have much traffic, and they start learning about search engine optimization (SEO). So, they start targeting their main keyword. Let’s say it’s a blogger writing about his debt, and how he hopes to end his debt through blogging. He starts to target the keywords “debt management.” After doing some SEO basics, and maybe a little bit of link building, he still is frustrated by not being in the top few pages on Google for “debt management” so he starts to give up. Instead of giving up, he should aim for long tail keywords.
His problem was that he was trying to blog about a keyword that many people are competing for. When there’s a lot of competition, it’s harder to rank higher in Google, therefore less visitors from Google. So, how can this problem be solved? By using long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are groups of keywords that are not too common when they are by themselves, but when they are grouped, they will be able to draw more customers to your website. Also, since those groups of keywords aren’t as popular, then it will be a lot easier to rank higher in the search engines. And since you’ll be targeting a fairly specific set of keywords, the people searching for those keywords will be more valuable customers since their search results will be laser targeted.
So how do you find long tail keywords for your site? The first step is to dive into your site statistics. Most statistics programs show you the keywords that were used to find you in the search engine. Start looking at some of the longer phrases that were used to find your site, and then write an article about that topic specifically. Also take a look at where you stand in the search engines already for those phrases. That will give you an idea if you really need to target that phrase with a few pages about that topic, or if one page will do. Make sure that you link to this new page from a couple of your other pages and external pages, using that long tail keyword as your anchor text for the link.
Another way is to use a free online tool from Google. (You can find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) You can search for the generic term that you want to use and it will often give a nice long list of popular searches, with a rough estimate of how many searches a month. (To see a more accurate monthly search volume, change the “Match Type” from “Broad” to “Exact”. Try searching the term “debt management” to get an ideas of long tail keywords.
The thing to remember when targeting long tail keywords is the value of small things when multiplied. Sure, it’d be awesome to rank first for a keyword that gets 300 searches a day. But, that will be a little bit harder. If, instead, you focus on 10 long tail keywords with 30 searches a day each, you’ll still get about 300 visitors to your site, but it’ll be a lot easier since you’ll probably rank higher for those keywords since they are long tail, and therefore less competitive.
Keyword Density
How important is Keyword Density?
One of the main things that search engines look at is keyword density. If your website or webpage on your site is targeted toward “cat toys” and you’ve mentioned “cat toys” only once rather than 15 times you’ve managed to establish keyword density. The more times you mention the targeted keyword the higher your keyword density is. However, if you mention “cat toys” 52 times but you never mention anything else other than gibberish you can easily get blacklisted on Google for spam. This means it’s unlikely that your site will place high in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) anytime in the near future.
Your target keyword should be in the Title tag, Meta Keyword, Meta Description, Heading tags, as well as located throughout the content in the body. Additionally using the bold tag to select your targeted keyword helps search engines realize that the specific keyword is an important keyword on the webpage.
You can use this article as an example. Look at how many times I’ve used keyword density and used it in a manner that makes sense and is useful to the reader. Additionaly you can see that I’ve used it in the title, meta keyword, meta description, heading tags and content as previously mentioned. Never underestimate the power of keyword density as today it remains one of the most important factors search engines use to determine worthwhile content.
