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…

Or is it?

In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can do to improve your search engine position. Nobody charges you for these so yes, they are free.

The problem here is that this tweaking takes time, and time isn’t free. If you have a business then you should be accounting for the time that you spend. Even if you don’t do this, it’s easy to see how SEO work sucks up a ton of time.

Is it easy to do? I think it’s pretty easy to create links from Squidoo, or digg or forum posts, but once you’ve got a couple of these from the easy sites, it starts to get harder.

If you’re busy on a forum, you can easily collect a lot of links. 100 links from posts on the same forum aren’t really worth much more to Google than one link. So where do truly valuable links come from? From other people’s sites. It’s good if they are buried inside lots of relevant content, and it’s even better if the number of these links grows over time.

So I’d say these types of links are hard to get.

As for success, it depends on factors such as search volume and competition.

You’ve got to choose your keywords really, really carefully to be successful. Vacation rentals tend to have a lot of competition on search results (don’t forget SEO is a popular method, like I said).

Even if you’ve done a great job of choosing your niche it’s pretty hard to translate that into a long tail keyword that come top on search results. Maybe your niche is “I’ve got the only 8 bedroom house by the water in Vancouver and I’m only targeting married couples with 16 children”. Do people type that phrase into Google? I doubt it.

So where does that leave us? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and I reckon that SEO can be tough for your vacation rental website. It certainly isn’t free. I’m sending some tips to my vacation rental subscribers later today and you can catch them too if you sign up for my free guide.

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!!

This is a nice endorsement of my work. I love writing stuff that other people like – who doesn’t?

It’s also proof of the principle: good content beats SEO.

In other words, create something that people love, or find useful, or enjoy reading, and you don’t really need to worry about keyword density, long tails or meta tags. Why? Because if people love your work they will (re)visit it and vote for it by linking to it. Links to your stuff are hugely important for PageRank: lots of links will get you higher in the search positions.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s still important to think about SEO. We’re working in a competitive world, after all, and everything you do to get yourself an edge is (probably) useful.

There’s a limit to how far you can go with SEO though. Instead of spending hours optimizing your new page, or blog post, or Squidoo lens, get started on creating another one.

Make sure it’s good though!