Using ‘Long-tail keywords’
Should you optimize your web pages for keywords that have 50,000 searches per day or those that have 5,000 per day?
Most people opt for the keywords that have 50,000 searches per day but I believe that this is a mistake. Let me explain why.
Keywords that have 50,000 searches per day are likely to have high competition and thus will be very hard to target in the search engines. You might get just 0.1% of that traffic. However, if you target keywords that have 5,000 searches per day, you might get 15% of that traffic, i.e., 15 times as much traffic.
One of the ways to target the lower volume searches even in a popular niche is to target ‘long-tail keywords’. A ‘long-tail keyword’ is one that typically is composed of three or more words. Because it is a longer phrase, it tends to be searched for much less than single words and two-word phrases. As a result, there is usually less competition in the search engines for the phrase giving you a good chance of ranking highly for it.
I will come back to how to choose a ‘long-tail keyword’ and optimize a web page for it in a future blog post.
