Thread: Long Tail Keywords

How important are long-tail keywords? I have read that if you choose the right ones and sprinkle them throughout your articles and headings, you can gain a lot of traffic through SERPS. I mostly try to target 1 or 2 keywords like "web 2.0 blogs" and try to hit the top of the search results for these keywords.

What is the best way to approach targeting keywords when writing articles?

I believe long-tail keywords are the most important ones to be targeted in a high competitive niche. Optimizing for long tails requires good on-page SEO for that particular keyword, keyword-specific linkbuilding is a bit difficult considering long tail keywords so most of the times domain age/authority plays a major role alongwith some other factors.
Below is an image demonstrating the differences in long-tail and competitive keywords.

I'm not sure how anyone could sum out and throw out percentages for 6 ranking factors that add up to 100% of your overall ranking score when Google has over 200 factors they consider each time they rank a URL for a particular keyword phrase. And since each engine has it's own ranking algorithm, some more... some less sophisticated, even if by miracle it was even remotely close to correct, it would likely ONLY be so for a single engine. ALWAYS take such generalizations with a grain of salt.

I doubt very seriously if Google weights ranking factors differently depending on the number of keyword in the search phrase. They likely weigh each ranking factor the same for head terms as they do for long tail terms... But it gives the "appearence" that on-page SEO carries more weight for long tail terms because no URLs score high for the other factors like link text.

For example, it's much more likely for a site to get high scores for inbound link text for the head term "mortgage" than it would be for them to get a high score for inbound link text for the long tail keyword phrase "current mortgage interest rates in Charlotte, NC". Far fewer sites or going to have inbound links with "current mortgage interest rates in Charlotte, NC" as the link text (or even slight variations of that) than will have inbound links with the link text "mortgage". So almost no one will score well on the longtail inbound link based ranking factors.

But they still are weighted the same by the ranking algorithm regardless of the search phrase. It just seems that "on page" factors carry more weight in long tail phrases because that's basically ALL they have to work with.

Originally Posted by Ascendancy

How important are long-tail keywords? I have read that if you choose the right ones and sprinkle them throughout your articles and headings, you can gain a lot of traffic through SERPS.

You have to consider what is a long tail keyword. My definition of a long tail keyword is a search phase using 5 or more words in the search phase.
Search engine traffic from long tails is increasing due to increased use of the the supplemental index by the Google search engine.

But the question is which long tail keywords are generating the traffic? I read somewhere that 50% of the longtail searches for a given month have never been searched before.

Originally Posted by Ascendancy

What is the best way to approach targeting keywords when writing articles?

I don't believe that by the nature of the long tail keyword you can target them per se. The best approach is to write keyword rich articles that use natural language.