You many or may not have heard reference to something called long tail keywords. Without a doubt most SEOs will rave about what can be done with such keywords. So let’s start by going over what they are.
To understand long tail keywords you must understand what type of keywords are not “long tail”. For a lack of a better term we are going to just call these “non-long tail” keywords “normal keywords”. These normal keywords are those keywords or phrase most searched for in search engines.
This could be something like “SEO” or “iphone“. Notice they are general keywords that lots of people would search for.
Log tail keywords are just the opposite. These are normally non-general keywords with not too many searches being preformed on them.
The funny thing about this is you would think those general keywords make up a larger number of searches, or search queries, then compared to those non-general keywords. But the truth is that the long tail keywords actually make up more searches than the normal keywords. Why is this?
Well it’s because there are more long tail keywords and when you add up all their search volume you get more searches being preformed. So why the name “long tail keywords”, well the name comes from the way the search volume looks on a graph – see below for what I mean.
Chart by SEOMoz.org
Examples of long tail keywords are “how does the body detox” or “what is the cause of Fibromyalgia“. As you can see these are not keywords you would think would be normally searched for and are some what specific.
But that also makes them more qualified visitors. The user searching for long tail keywords is normally looking for a very specific thing and if your site is about that specific subject then your a perfect match! Those are the visitors you want, as compared to someone searching for a very general term and only visiting your site to see it’s not what they were really looking for.
So long tail keywords have a due benefit. One they are generally easy to rank for since there is a low number of searches and thus normally lower competition. And two, those searching on long tail keywords are looking for a very specific subject and are thus more-likely to be a qualified buyer or visitor to your site.
