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…

Here’s the 5th rule for successful keywords:

5. They must be good for conversions on your website

What’s a conversion? It’s just an event that leads you towards your website goal – such as clicking a link, buying a product or signing up for a free report.

If you keywords don’t lead your site towards your goal, then why use them? it’s potentially worse than this though. I’d be really upset if you wasted weeks of SEO effort chasing keyword combinations that do nothing for your site.

It helps if you’ve checked some of the other 1-4 rules here: if the keyword is laser-targeted to your niche and relevant to the page, then you increase the chance of a conversion. This doesn’t guarantee it’ll convert though.

So that’s the 5th rule, unless I think of any more!

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?

A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

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

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.

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!!

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?