I read this on a forum the other day and this got me thinking. Are people really that confused about long tails when choosing their website keywords?

OK, so what about ‘apple store locator’, or ‘bmw financial services’, or ‘american idol 2009′?

They all have 3 words too, so are they long tail keywords?

I’m guessing you’ve realized that the answer is no. So what makes a long tail keyword?

Long tail keywords are the many hundreds (possibly thousands) of keyword combinations that bring traffic to your website. They usually bring in a very small number of visitors each (maybe only 1 or 2) and they are usually fairly long combinations of words: 4, 5, 6 or more – and yes, even 3 words sometimes!

When you add up the traffic from all the long tail keywords it usually comes to a significant number, often more than the traffic from your main site keywords.

This reflects the real activity going on at search engines too. There are many more searches for each of those main keywords, but a lot more search combinations of the long tail keywords.

There are some great things about long tail keywords too:

• They tend to be very specific, so you can see exactly what people are searching for
• They tend to have much lower SEO competition, so if you choose these for your website keywords, you stand a better chance of ranking well on search results with these terms

So what’s wrong with a 3-word long tail keyword? Take the example ‘american idol 2009′. There’s a huge number of searches for this term (1 million a month). There’s a huge amount of website competition (35 million results on Google). Plus, it’s not very specific – you don’t know whether searchers are looking for TV schedules, iTunes downloads, info on the stars, or pictures of Simon Cowell.

Not a very long tail combination then. A better example might be ‘cheap tickets for american idols live san diego’. See what I mean? There a low (almost zero) number of searches for this term, plus it’s definitely NOT 3 words long…

To recap, a great keyword must be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

Have you heard? General keywords are out and ultra-focused long-tail combinations are in. I’m thinking here about the difference between ‘Gordon Ramsay’ and ‘Gordon Ramsay hamburger recipe’. Focused keywords help you to zero in on your niche and to write content that searchers are really looking for.

If you go for general terms, you’ll find it hard to compete and get your website seen on search engines. You’ll also risk writing content that’s too general for your visitors.

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

Keyword relevance is vital and the closer to your subject area the better. Going back to Gordon for a second, there’s no point going for the hamburger keyword if your page is about the latest repeat of Kitchen Nightmares. Yes, they are related, but your average web visitor only gives you a nanosecond to show them exactly what they are looking for.

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

The first two points will be wasted if you don’t have a decent search volume of people looking for your chosen keyword. It’s easy to find long-tail keyword combinations, but you need to know there’s someone out there looking for them. You can use online tools such as Wordtracker or AdWords to check out search volumes for your keyword shortlist.

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

Once you have 1 to 3 nailed down, you’re probably well on the way, but you need to check how much competition you have. Long tail keywords mostly have lower competition than general terms (not always) but you need to verify this.

It’s OK to measure how many competing sites you have using a simple Google search, but that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Google will return everything that seems relevant and that includes all the different combinations and extensions of your keyword. If you’re going to do this properly, you need to see whether the other sites have been optimized for search. What does this mean? I’m talking about titles, tags, text and links – standard SEO stuff.

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that these rules are important.

Do your keywords pass the test?

One of my subscribers asked me about this today. If you know me then you won’t be surprised to hear that I had a simple answer:

1. Get the right niche/keywords
2. Write superb content using these keywords

… and then (only then)…

3. Get started on the SEO tweaks

How can it be this simple? Well, it’s not really. Working out the answers to number 1 and number 2 can be pretty hard. It can take a while to get these right, and you should spend time perfecting them.

My point is that if you get the first 2 parts right, then they can have such a huge effect on your search traffic, any SEO tweaks that you make are not going to make much difference.

The other way to look at this is that if you’ve got the wrong keywords and/or your content is poor, there’s not much point spending a huge amount of time on SEO.

Don’t get wrong though. SEO tweaks are important, and they can help you to get that vital edge over your competition.

So don’t ignore number 3!!

If you’ve used the css background technique to create a nice image background for one of your Squidoo lenses, I’ll add it to the Top 15 list on my Squidoo CSS Background lens.

CSS Background is a style feature that allows you to add a variety of backgrounds behind the text on a web page. You can choose solid colors, or if you feel like being artistic, you can add an image.

This is a great way to spice up your web pages or Squidoo lenses. You can use it for the main body of your text – imagine a story about a beach holiday, displayed over a beautiful ocean background.

Another place where this gets used is to put simple graphics behind navigation links. These will usually be small pictures that repeat to build an attractive navigation bar.

On Squidoo you can build a link voting plexo, where visitors can add their own suggestions for links, then vote for their favorites. I’ve found this is a great way to interact with your visitors and to give them the chance to send you some feedback.

There’s space for 15 links right now. Closing soon!

• I don’t have the time
• Too many ideas/techniques to choose from
• I’m scared of making a mistake, or making my site worse

OK. These are all valid reasons. We’ve all been there. I’ll let you into a little secret though:

You are in the best position you could ever be to improve your website.

Does this surprise you? Probably. Here’s why it’s true though:

• You own your website, so you can change anything you like
• It’s all electronic, so you can change it any time
• You own all of your site analytics, so you can measure what’s working
• if you keep backups, you can correct any mistake (you do keep backups, don’t you?)

So really, with this in mind, is there really any excuse for NOT having a go? What do you have to lose?

Consider how your situation would be if you were trying to fix a different kind of product. Maybe a book. Making changes to a printed publication can be difficult and time consuming. As a website owner you are in a much better position than this.

It’s not hard to make changes. The difficult bit is deciding what to change, and then having the willpower to measure the results, compare them to previous results, and then either keep the change or try something else. None of these steps are hard though.

It could be something as simple as changing the anchor text in a key link. You’d be surprised how such a little change can have a big impact on your website results.

Just make sure you keep the original files, so you can backtrack if things get worse. It can happen, but this is all part of the improvement process.

OK. No more excuses. What can you change on your website today?

It’s hard to miss the number of portable devices out there these days and the huge number of people who are regularly using them to visit websites. You don’t want to ignore this part of the market so it’s wise to think about making your site work well on these devices.

There are a couple of problems here. One is the limited resources (small screen, limited user input, etc) and the other is the vast range of devices that you need to support. Most of these devices demand some fairly major changes to your site layout and content to make it work successfully. This can be the biggest headache for you and your site.

One solution here is to pay attention to the market – the iPhone and iPod Touch now account for at least 0.23 percent of web traffic in the US. That may not seem a lot, but it’s a growing number, and it’s larger than the share of any other mobile browser. So it may be a wise solution to target your site just to these devices.

The good news here is that the iPhone has improved the user experience massively. It’s a joy to use and includes support for many web standards, such as XHTML, CSS2 and Javascript. The iPhone is able to do this because its browser is based on the Webkit Open Source Browser Engine (as do the Nokia N95 and Android phones).

This means that you really don’t have to make many changes to your site to get it to work on the iPhone. Great news. Of course the iPhone brings some amazing capabilities for browsing full-sized websites, with easy zooming and scrolling using the touch screen display.

If you want you can take this further and target your site more towards the iPhone: change the site so it’s more ’small screen friendly’, with button-style navigation and less use of zooming. This makes it more of an iPhone-like application (think of how iTunes looks different on the smaller display). Actually this can be a useful exercise in itself – can you distill your pages down into their key content, just focussing on headlines and titles?

The iPhone keypad is pretty good but still not as useable as a full-size keyboard, so it’s good to find ways to reduce the requirement for visitors to type in text.

Also why not explore some new capabilities that are unique to a mobile site? What can you do with an onboard camera? What about location information?

Even if you don’t dive headfirst into these fancy features, you should be able to create a good user experience for your site using the iPhone. By doing this you are making a decision not to target the older, less capable devices. In a way you are ignoring the long tail of multiple mobile browsers.

What does this mean for you as a website owner? It means that more of your visitors will be browsing your site on mobile devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones. The recent release of the new iPhone will increase this number.

So what? Good question.

How does your website work on an iPhone, or a cellphone? Have you checked? The biggest difference is that these portable devices have a much smaller display than your average PC or laptop. This can mean that your nicely laid-out pages are squashed, stretched, and otherwise moved around [obviously this is less of a problem on the iPhone, but it's true for most other devices].

Mobile devices tend to be slower than PCs, so loading times are longer. If your site relies on large images or flash animations these can make the browsing experience pretty lousy.

Unless you code your pages properly, your CSS stylesheet can be ignored. This means your fonts can be messed up too, for example with oversized letters in headings.

So here’s a list of useful guidelines to follow to make sure your website works well for your mobile visitors:

1. Design for the smaller screen. Go for less columns, and ideally no horizontal scrolling
2. Use a separate CSS stylesheet and switch to a mobile version
3. Design your pages for input with a stylus/trackball, rather than a mouse
4. Reduce image sizes, or remove them altogether
5. Disable flash animations
6. Make fonts compatible with the smaller screen size (especially headings)

If you follow these guidelines you’ll provide a better browsing experience for your visitors. Hopefully they will spend more time on your site and come back in the future for more…

Just click the picture to download

Does your site provide the profits that you want? Do you get enough visitors? Can you find yourself where you want to be on Google?

If the answer to these is no then I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your site

What do you do about this? There’s plenty of help out there. 1000’s of websites and blogs and books all offering schemes to help you. Did I say 1000’s? Actually I meant millions.

And there’s the problem. Which tips and schemes do you choose? Which do you ignore? Which do you start first?

The solution is to read my guide. I’ve written about the ideas that I have used to make my websites work. They are all tried and tested and they all worked for me.

I’ll show you how to start taking control of your website and getting the results you want.

The guide is free and all you need to do is click on the picture to download it.

In this guide I’ll show you how to:

1. Build compelling content that search engines love and which keeps your visitors coming back for more
2. Get visitors to your site using AdWords without spending a fortune
3. Learn how to shape up your style – including the psychology behind great color schemes
4. Find out how all of this might be irrelevent if you don’t have a unique and compelling product
5. Stop losing visitors – improve your site navigation

Remember: you should be getting the results that YOU want from your site. It’s time to get back in control and get a Better Website

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!

Is your website design too complicated? Do you have too much technology? Or, is it easy to understand what your site is about and is it easy to use?

With all this web technology around competing for your attention its easy to get distracted by what you can put on your website, rather than what you should put on your website. These days it’s not hard to get some flash animation or even a soundtrack. But do these actually help your website? Do they help to attract and retain visitors? Do they help add lots of useful content so you’ll be indexed by Google and the other search engines?

Don’t get me wrong, some of the best websites are able to combine great technology with compelling content. They are also successful. For your website though, don’t be too distracted by these until you’ve made sure you’ve developed something that’s really useful for your visitors. They may be initially impressed by your flash intro (maybe) but it may not keep them coming back for more.