I’ve been hearing that phrase so often lately, three months ago I hadn’t heard it at all.  The termed has been around since 2004 and was coined by Chris Anderson in an article featured in Weird Magazine.

Basically it’s nothing new really.  Just the phrase of the day people use when they want you to know they know their stuff (LOL :D)  It’s a fancy name for multi-word keyword phrases that are made up of three, four, or more words. 

If you want to get targeted traffic to your site, you must find out what Long Tail keywords are being searched on in that niche and target them.

It use to be that generic keywords would do the trick and bring you traffic.  Hasn’t been that way for a long time.  Searchers are getting a lot more savvy and smart when it comes to filtering out the crap when doing a search.

At one time if you wanted to find out information on (just picking the first thing that pops into my head here) dog training that is what you’d type into Google and you’d get a zillion results.  Now you might search for something like:

dog crate training

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guard dog training

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dog training german shepherd

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dog training maltese

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dog obedience class

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dog kennel training

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house training a dog

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I just plugged that into Google keyword tool, and I’m only printing a few results just to show you.  See how the keywords are very SPECIFIC?  They are three to four words long and would bring in very targeted searchers.

What you need to do is find out what searches are being done on your topic and then write your article geared toward those phrases.   This is a really basic example. 

I found an awesome article that Maki at Dosh Dosh did, How to Find and Target Long Term Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic.   This article describes in great detail the steps you need to follow to see the targeted results. 

I was impressed with all the free tools shared in the post that are available to conduct your keywords and optimize your site. 

One that I thought was really cool and hadn’t seen before was SEODigger.  This site will show you an analysis of your competitors keywords, all you have to do is type in the website url.

Another one I liked was HitTail Tool.  After placing some simple code on your blog, it will start analyzing what long term keywords are being used to bring searchers to your site and give you information on the results.

Maki also outlines the specific strategy he uses to find and target long tail keywords used in creating his websites.

So basically, paying attention to what search terms are being used to get visitors to your site will help you:

• learn more specifically what visitors want.  Remember nobody ever wanted to buy a drill, they wanted the hole.  Find out what your visitors are looking for and then give it to them.
• be more visible to more people.  By providing quality content around these keyword phrases, you’ll rank higher in the search engines.
• turn more visitors into paying customers.  You know what they’re looking for so of course you’re going to provide it to them.

Expect the Best,

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Blogging, Tips and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.