One of the most important parts of building your website is doing your keyword research.
Choosing the right keywords and optimizing each one of your pages separately is the difference between paying for traffic and getting it free. But not any keywords will do. You need to carefully choose the best keywords and that includes examining the long tail keywords.
The long tail and short tail keywords
Keywords can be divided into two categories, long tail and short tail. Let's take for example the keywords 'athletic shoes'. This is a perfect example of a short tail keyword, however if I expand that keyword phrase into 'steel toe athletic shoes' this is considered a long tail keyword, but it's also much more descriptive and targeted to what someone may be looking for.
To find good keywords I typically use Wordtracker but most any keyword tool will will work, however for purposes of this demonstration I'll be using Wordtracker …you can follow along by using the Wordtracker free trial if you like.
As an example let's take a look at the long tail keyword phrase 'womens athletic shoes' or 'designer mens athletic shoes'. If we examine each of these key phrases in Wordtracker we see the following:
Shoes 8032 (short tail)
athletic shoes 209 (short tail)
womens athletic shoes 17 (long tail)
mens athletic shoes 34 (long tail)
steel toe athletic shoes 20 (long tail)
discount athletic shoes 18 (long tail)
designer mens athletic shoes 2 (long tail)
The difference between the long tail and short tail keywords is that the short tail keywords have about 30% more competing web pages than the long tail keywords, what this means to you is that a web page targeting the keywords 'athletic shoes' has a lesser chance of ranking well than it would for the term ‘womens athletic shoes’ or ‘discount womens athletic shoes’. The term ‘athletic shoes’ may get many more searches but you have to work a lot harder to get a decent ranking, however the long tail keywords give you a much better chance to rank well.
Think of it this way, what would you rather be optimized for, a keyword that gets 1000 searches a day but puts you 20 pages into the ranking, or a keyword phrase that gets 12 searches a day but ranks 1,2 or 3 in the search engines? I think I'd rather have the latter.
Finding your keywords
Let's say you have a page about ‘boots’. You might be tempted to use the short tail keyword 'boots' because of the huge amount of searches it gets a day, about 1700 a day, but there are also over 74,000,000 competing web pages using that keyword …that's a lot! Now let's look at these phrases:
Count / Keyphrase
142 fashion boots
17 discount boots
5 womens dress boots
5 discount womens boots
30 women's fashion boots
10 womens leather boots
6 women's leather boots
20 ladies knee high boots
3 womens knee high boots
These phrases have fewer search counts but the number of competing pages is also much less:
Competing pages / Keyphrase
418,000 fashion boots
50,000 discount boots
23,000 womens dress boots
18,200 discount womens boots
983 women's fashion boots
128,000 womens leather boots
34,300 women's leather boots
3110 ladies knee high boots
6600 womens knee high boots
Each of those looks a lot better than 74,000,000. This means your chances are better for natural search engine ranking for these phrases.
To find out the number of competing pages, simply type the keyword phrase into Google using double quotes, and at the top right will show you the number of competing pages. The fewer the competing pages the better.
Using the Competition
Competition is a good thing and you want to use it to your advantage. That means checking out who your competitors are and taking a closer look at what is getting them good ranking.
Because inbound links are huge to ranking well, it makes sense to see who is linking to your competing sites.
To find the number of inbound links a web site has, use the Yahoo! link checker by going to yahoo.com and typing in: link:http://siteaddress
For example, the keyword phrase 'discount running shoes' gets 108 searches a day on Wordtracker, so if I go to Google and type in the keyword phrase "discount running shoes" (use the quotes) then select the one of the first five search entries that comes up and type that address into Yahoo! link checker, I can see for example, that the #4 result on Google for that keyword phrase has less than 60 inbound links.
(Keep in mind that at the time of this writing you may see different results.)
If I can get at least that many inbound links to my site for that keyword phrase and do proper keyword optimization, I have an excellent chance of ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase.
Now 60 links or even several hundred links may seem like a lot, but if you write an article on how to select 'discount running shoes' let's say and place it on a well known article directory, you will have lots of inbound links to that page in just a few days. That's why article marketing is such a key marketing element.
All your pages should rank well individually, don't just focus on your home page, so if you have pages that you specifically want to rank well for, then optimizing each of them in this way will bring you the most traffic.
One additional benefit of using long tail keywords is they can be several keywords in one. Take for example the phrase: ‘womens knee high fashion boots’. This phrase includes all of these keywords as well:
boots
fashion boots
knee high fashion boots
knee high boots
womens boots
womens fashion boots
So using the long tail keyword gives you a far more reaching advantage.
How to Optimize your site's Keywords
Once you've found the keyword phrases for your site's page, you should include that keyword phrase in your page's file name, title tag, description tag, keywords tag and within your page text.
Here is where you should include your keyword phrase:
- The page file name – Your page file name should include your page's keyword phrase. For example: http://www.yoursitename.com/keywordphrase.html
- Title tag of the page – Your title should contain your keyword phrase along with a benefit that your page may provide
- Description Tag – Your description tag should inspire interest but also try to include your keyword phrase.
- The text heading of your page using an H1 tag
- The text sub-heading. Any h2, h3 or h4 tags that you use should also contain the keyword phrase
- The body of the page. Use the keyword phase in the body but don't compromise the flow of your text and don't overuse the key phrase.
I've often just used it once in the body and that has been sufficient.
- Text Links - Use the keyword phrase as a text link on your site and place the text link on at least 3 other pages on your site. This gives you some 'internal linking' that the search engines also count as 'good links'. Here's an example of a text link:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/"> Keyword Phrase
How to get your keywords to work for you
Now that you have your targeted keyword phrases you should also use them in forum posts, articles and blog post by creating text links as shown above. This is where you will get some good 'external links' working for you.
Don’t focus only on getting traffic to your home page as much, use text links and articles to draw traffic to other pages of your site as well, particularly if your pages are highly focused for specific items or ideas.
Related posts:
- Changes With Your Google Rankings & The Long Tail
- SEO Tip: Stop Using Non-Relevant Contextual Links
- How To Find Profitable Niche Ideas
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