Key word phrases and long tailed keywords are a good
source of traffic.
Without the right keywords and keyword phrases you will get little or
no traffic, at least from the search engines.
Use keyword phrases that people
really search for.
You need to find out what key words people are using when they search
for the product or service that you are offering. It isn't always
easy to figure out what words a human being will use when searching for
something. Use a keyword research tool such as
WordTracker to discover and research your keyword phrases.
Long Tailed Keywords and keyword phrases
Avoid single keywords. A single keyword is very broad and thus
will have a very large number of sites trying to be ranked first for
that keyword. The more keywords in the phrase, the more targeted
and narrow the focus will be and thus there will be fewer sites
competing with you for those keywords. Keywords with more than two words
are known as long tailed keywords, and they can account for a massive
amount of traffic.
My Chilipepper site gets 60% of it's traffic (about 4,000 unique
visitors a day) from long-tailed key words that are searched for no more
than once a month.
It's not unusual for people to use 8, 10, or more keywords in one
phrase. The most I've seen in my stats is 15 I think. I believe
that Google allows searches of up to 32 words.
In most cases a
single keyword is pretty useless. You need to think in terms of key word
phrases of two or more words.
For example, if your site is about rare breeds of dogs, the keyword
"dog" is pretty useless to you. You would have to compete with
304,000,000 other pages on Google to get some ones attention. The answer
is in long tailed key words.
A Google search for "rare dog breeds" with quote marks shows 21,700
competitive pages. It's a whole lot easier to make it to the 1st page
of search results if you only have to compete with 21,700 pages as
opposed to 304,000,000 pages.
However, if no one ever searches for "rare dog breeds", then it is
worse than the one word "dog". Good key word phrases are phrases that
are really searched for, and closely relate to your web page topic. Be
assured, for any keyword search there is almost always a large number of
long tailed keywords and long tailed keyword phrases.
Keyword research and key word tools are vitally important to your
SEO efforts.
This is why keyword research tools such as
WordTracker
are so important. Optimize for keyword phrases that people really search
for, and find key word phrases that you would not have thought of
without the tool. See which keywords are worthwhile pursuing and which
are not. Using these tools find the keywords that have the least
competition.
WordTracker shows you exactly how often any keyword or keyword phrase
is searched for and how much competition you have in getting to that
coveted number one spot. It even tells you how many searchers would see
your listing if you were on the 1st page of results for a number of the
engines including Google. It's about $60 I think, to use the
service for a month, and it's worth every penny and more.
WordTracker or one of the other keyword research tools make the
difference between a great site and a site that languishes without any
traffic.
Work the keyword phrases into your body text, title tags, Alt tags,
and link text.
You don't want to heavily load your copy with the key word phrases,
just enough that the search engines know they are being used.
There are a variety of ways that WordTracker
can be utilized to find the keywords you need, and lots of information
at their website to show you how to use the tools they offer. You can
use the WordTracker
software to find out more about your customers, what they want and what
they are searching for.
Don't think that everyone thinks the way you do. For instance, when
talking about water heaters I would never use the term "hot water
heater", since it heats cold water, not hot water.
By using the WordTracker keyword research tool
I found that more people search for "hot water heater" than search for
"water heater". Very valuable information if you want lots of free
search engine traffic. So I optimize one of my water heating pages for
"water heater", and one page for "hot water heater".
WordTracker
also showed me that people searched for "water heater repair", "water
heater maintenance", and "tankless water heaters" and even "tankless hot
water heaters" etc. In fact of all the terms used, tankless
water heaters is the most searched for term in the whole group.
Caution: Try to stick to keywords and long tailed keyword phrases that attract visitors who are
genuinely looking for what you have to offer. If you reach out too
broadly, you will end up with a lot of traffic but useless traffic that
doesn't click on the ads and don't take whatever actions you wish them
to. You must target effectively the audience that is interested in
your content.
This will increase the number of visitors that
"bounce" off of your site when they land there from a search engine
listing. If they only stay a few seconds and then bounce back to
the search results page then the search engines can lower your value for
those keywords being used.
Don't forget that sometimes your location is an important keyword
phrase. If you offer products or services at specific locations then
they should definitely be in your list of important long tailed keywords.
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