May 18th, 2010 by Susie

In a world where search ranking and number of click throughs appears to be the only thing that matters, it is questionable as to whether companies actually care enough about the quality of their clicks and are more concerned with volume. With many a search engine optimization company boasting their ability to get you a number one search engine position, this seems to be the only thing that some SEO companies are concerned with.

A lot of people would argue that quality is better than quantity, which is where long tail keywords come in. Keywords can be described as either short tail or long tail, with a long tail keyword consisting of four words or greater. Short tail keywords are more commonly used and are great for getting a higher position within search engine results pages (SERPs). They are also effective at driving traffic to your website, but is that traffic valuable?

Just because you get a lot of clicks to your website it does not mean that visitors stick around and use the site or make a purchase. Long tail keywords are designed to narrow down the search for people so that they are provided with a more specific set of results as opposed to a larger selection of similar results. When creating long tail keywords you should think carefully about the specific and precise ways in which someone would search for your product or services.

For example, your company may offer discount designer shoes. If you use these three words as a keyword, then there are likely to be hundreds of other results appear along with your website in the SERPs. If however, you created some long tail keywords such as cheap Kurt Geiger ladies designer shoes then you are providing a search result that matches the searchers request almost perfectly. Of course, the number of search results which your site will appear in will be less; however the ones which you do appear in are more likely to click to your site and make a purchase.

With SEO long tail keywords being so specific, you will need to create multiple variations of them. In the designer shoes example you would need links to different brands, gender targeting and also multiple variations on the word ‘cheap’ or ‘discount’. It may sound tricky at first, but it is fairly simple to work out, all you need to do is identify as many different ways as possible of saying the same thing.

With the use of long tail keywords comes more web pages within your site to link to. This bodes well from a search engine point of view as a site with multiple pages often appears more robust and trusted. The other positive thing about long tail keywords from a search engine perspective is that the relevance of the keyword and the page could not be more accurate. This means you are offering a very natural and ethical link which can result in a higher search ranking.

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