The use of long tail keywords is a different kind of strategy for bringing people to a website. This encourages lots of well-written, in-depth content and is in keeping with new mandates from Google. A long tail keyword is a keyword that is made up of more words and that is likely to see a lower volume of traffic in the short term, but potentially more in the long term. This is why it can also be known as a long term keyword.
What Are Keywords?
The term keyword is very often used to refer to keyphrases – collections of words that make up common Google search terms. For instance, if you sold hats, then a ‘keyword’ that would bring someone to your website might be ‘buy hats online’. This is a regular keyword. It was likely discovered through basic keyword research which would have revealed that lots of people searched for the term on a regular basis.
Likewise if you ran a fitness website, you might target keywords such as:
- How to get abs
- Build muscle
- Bodybuilding articles
- Diet ideas
- Etc
Introducing Long Tail Keywords
A long tail keyword is slightly different however. This is a form of keyword that is not likely to get a high search volume. Rather, these keywords are much longer phrases that someone might type in on the off-chance. For instance:
“the best way to build six pack abs if you only have a four pack’
Or
“how many calories can you save by eating less butter”
These are phrases that are very specific and that you won’t find lots of people searching for regularly. However, that also means that if you happen to have very similar phrasing on your website, then you probably won’t be going up against tough competition in order to get those articles seen and read.
This also means you don’t need a high density of keywords in your text. Including that phrase once or twice maximum will be more than enough to bring the odd random search to your brand.
Other Keyword Tips
There are more tips for good keyword use too and these generally revolve around avoiding the tendency to ‘stuff’ keywords (repeat the same keywords over and over) in pages where they look unnatural. For instance, Google now encourages latent semantic indexing, which means that you should not only use the keywords themselves, but also related terms that occur naturally when writing about that subject.
Likewise, the optimal density for keyword use has gone down significantly to around 1-2% maximum. So for every 100 words, you should only include one or two keywords. As you can see then, trying to game the system no longer works. The best way to be successful with keywords today is to let them come naturally and organically.
