Search Engine Keywords - The Long Tail Story

We all need some ways to get ahead of our competition on Google and other search engines and we shouldn't under estimate the value of the long tail keyword!  What on earth is that?

Giving some thought to the right keywords to give you a better chance of getting found on Google is important if there are lots of other people writing about the same subjects as you.

The chances are that there might be a great deal of competition for your chosen keywords. The more competition you have the less chance you have of getting a high search ranking on Google.

As an example, using the keywords ‘web designers’ and ‘London’ are going to make my life very difficult, as there are thousands of web designers in London.  In these cases you need to think about categorising and localising; e.g. ‘freelance web designers London SW6′ will give you a much better chance of being found.  The category being web designers and the locality being SW6.

So there we have a long tail keyword phrase, a keyword of 3 or more words.  This increases the possibility of a Google page 1 search result.  Whilst this long tail keyword phrase might not be number one in terms of volume of searches, it does mean that the people who find you are actually looking for your product or service.  They have been specific in what they want and have found you.  This means better quality traffic that will stay and enjoy your website.

‘Web design for giant pandas’ is a long tail keyword but you might need to get even more specific than that.  For example ‘web design for giant pandas who like green shoots’  is likely to get you more high quality hits because visitors who find you are specifically looking for those keywords.

Lots of this should happen naturally as you write your content.  You are writing about what you do, everything is relevant and helps Google to put your site into context.  There is not much point in being a web designer and writing about meerkats.  Unless you design websites for meerkats but that makes no sense because as you already know, I only work for pandas!