Posts Tagged ‘Long Tail’

Before you begin your website’s on-page optimisation and link building, it is important to first research which keywords and search phrases will attract relevant visitors. To do this there are a few tools and techniques which will help you make a decision on which keywords to target.

Keyword Research Tools

Probably the most popular keyword research tool on the Internet is the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool created by Aaron Wall. This tool currently exports data from Wordtracker which periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms collected from Dogpile and Metacrawler. From these Wordtracker results this tool then estimates the daily search volume levels from Google, Yahoo and MSN for each search term. Typing in a keyword or search phrase will also bring back a variety of related search terms that also generate volume. Previously this tool used results from Overture’s keyword suggestion tool which generated volume results from their paid search network. Now that it uses Wordtracker, the volume results for this tool seem a lot more accurate.

Another tool to use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This again will bring back a variety of related search terms to the keywords you type in and will provide search volumes, this time though in the form of a bar rather than an actual number. Although this data is taken from Google’s paid search results, it is still valuable information as you are gaining knowledge of search volume actually from Google and not third party esitmates. Another useful result from this too is the search volume trends which shows monthly totals throughout the year and allows you to judge seasonality and possible search volume dips and peaks.

Google Trends can be useful if you have previous knowledge of search volumes for a particular search term as it will allow you to compare this term against other searches. Again, results are in the form of graphs rather than actual numbers, but knowing volumes for a particular search term will help you judge the volumes for others. Google Trends also breaks the traffic down into regions which is essential as it will show if a search term is popular within the location you are targeting.

Using PPC Results

If you run Pay Per Click campaign for your website the this can help quickly target useful search terms to target for SEO. If you do not run a PPC campaign the take a small budget, set one up and test a selection of relative search terms. Although it may not be possible to achieve a first page ad for competitive search terms without blowing your budget, it can allow you to almost instantly gain and idea of whether other long tail search terms will generate visitors.

Competitors

It is always worth looking at your competitor’s websites to see which search terms they are targeting. If your competitor’s website has been search engine optimised properly then you only have to look at their html title tags to see how they have gone about trying to target keywords.

Conclusion

Keyword research is an essential part of the SEO process. Get it wrong and you could end up putting a lot of effort into gaining results for search terms that will not generate visitors. Get it right and you may pick up a lot of traffic from uncompetitive search terms that go unnoticed by other competing websites. Using these tools and methods will help you make decisions on which search terms you choose to target and should help you on your way to creating a successful busy website.

HTML title tags (<title>) are currently the most important on-page factor when optimising your webpages for search engine results. For the majority of search engines the title tag is the first point of call to summarise the theme of a webpage and to help rank that webpage accordingly within their listings. Obviously there are many other factors that generate the overall ranking but optimising your title tags right will generally provide results for your targeted search terms.

Target Individual Webpages Towards Search Terms

For search engine optimisation, it is vitally important that your website has individual webpages with content targeted towards keywords and search terms. Each of these webpages should have their own unique title tag that includes the search terms you are hoping to be found for within search engines.

How People Search

Think about how you would type in a search into a search engine. It is unlikely you would type in a phrase such as “How You Should Optimise Title Tags”. There is more of a chance that you may type “How Should I Optimise Title Tags”, but people tend to shorten the total words needed to type a phrase as much as possible and will be more likely to type “How to Optimise Title Tags”. Search engines would pick up the all above variations but by targeting the most popularly typed phrase you are increasing your chances of ranking better for that search term. There are many keyword tools on the Internet that allow you to research which keywords are popular and how searches are being typed.

Variations of Prime Keywords

If your website is targeted towards a certain group of keywords and search terms, then use the webpage title tags to target variations of your main keywords. For example, the main titles on our website are targeted towards “Search Engine Optimisation” and “SEO”. Notice how within our SEO blog articles we sometimes use variations such as “Search Engine Optimising for Long Tail Search Results” and the title of this post “How to Optimise Title Tags”. By doing this you can catch more visitors for a variety of possible related search terms.

Put Search Terms First

The closer the keywords are to the beginning of the title tag the more relevant and more weight that webpage will carry towards that keyword. So for example if your webpage had a title of “red widgets & blue widget” and another website’s webpage had a title of “blue widget & red widgets”, if you did a search for “blue widget” then the other website more likely to rank above your website (if all other factors are equal) simply because the search term is nearer the beginning of the title tag. A lot of companies put their brand terms first and then the page title, which is good if you are a recognised brand as it builds confidence and provides familiarity to potential visitors and may help encourage click from search listings, but it can be a slight disadvantage if you are looking to rank higher than a competitor who puts brand terms at the end of the title tag or left them out completely.

Another good reason to put the search term nearer to the beginning of your title tag is that search engines use the title to provide the link to your webpage in their listings. There is limited space (68 characters in Google) for your title within the search engine listing so it is important to make it obvious what the webpage is about.

Higher Rankings

Search engines rank webpages due to a variety of calculations and having keywords within your URLs helps increase your rankings for those targeted search terms. This works especially well when many dynamic pages are created which can target a variety of less competitive long tail search terms.

Highlighted Search Terms in Search Engine Listings

When you type in a keyword search into search engines the results returned will include links to relevant webpages. What you will notice is that the keywords that you have typed in will be highlighted within the listings, this includes the display URL. So by having the keywords within your URL, you will help your webpage listing stand out and help encourage a click.

Easier to Read and Remember

Visitors to your webpage will find it a lot easier to read the URL which again is useful when your webpage is listed in search engine results. It will allow users to quickly realise that your webpage is relevant to their search results. Compared to dynamic URLs, rewrote URLs are often a lot easier to remember which will help when visitors wish to return to you webpage whether through search engines, re-typing the URL or browsing their history.

Better Indexing

Search engines can have problems indexing webpages created through a dynamic URL, especially if there are several parameters within the URL. Rewriting a URL gives you control over the structure and allows you to reduce the total parameters or structure the URL to look more like a static URL.

What are Long Tail Search Terms?

The ultimate goal when search engine optimising a website within a competitive market is to reach position 1 in the rankings for the most relevant popular search term. Whilst nothing is impossible, sometimes this goal may be unachievable with the given resources or may be more realistic as a long term goal. This is where long tail search terms become a useful way to provide a quick return and generate traffic to your website.

Let us take a website that sells football kits as an example. Now the obvious search terms and keywords that we would like to target during the optimisation of the website are “football”, “kits” and, of course, “football kits”. So here we would be targeting really competitive search terms which, unless we manage to rank within the top 10 search engine results, are unlikely to provide any return.

The quickest way around this is to target long tails search terms, so for the above example we may look to include an extra keyword so that we target search terms such as “cheap football kits” or “new football kits”. This is the beginning of the long tail. If the website sells Liverpool kits then we can start to look at terms such as “Liverpool football kit”, “Liverpool home kit”, “Liverpool away shirt” and even “new Liverpool home socks 07/08″. Then you could also target player names like “Steven Gerrard home shirt”.

So as you can see we now have a selection of search terms that we can target and use to help attract possible customers visit the website.

How do you Target Long Tail Search Results?

Sticking with the football kits example, for every kit sold on the website you would look to have an individual page which we could use to target the long tail search terms. A classic online store structure usually consists of something similar to the following format:

Home –>Categories –> Sub-Categories –> Product Pages

Now the home page could target general terms such as “football kits” and “cheap football kits” then the categories may be made up of the individual leagues and would be optimised for a search term such as “English Premiership football kits” or “Scottish Premier League football shirts”, plus at the categories level you may have sections targeting the terms “new football kits” and “football kit sale”. Then your sub-categories are likely to be the teams within each league which is when you target search terms such as “Liverpool football kit” or “Man United football kits”. And finally each product should have its own landing page targeted for related search terms, so for example “Liverpool home shirt 07/08″ or “Tottenham Hotspur 125 years home shirt”. These terms are now really long tail and really targeted.

What are the Benefits of Optimising for Long Tail?

Even though these long tail search terms may individually bring you little traffic, collectively they can provide a surge of new visitors who otherwise may never have found your website.

Taking the online store model above, lets say you have (obviously) 1 home page, 10 category pages, 20 sub-category pages within each category and then 100 product pages within each sub-category. That gives you 20,211 web pages which you can use to target individual long tail search terms. If each of those pages could bring you 1 visitor per day then you are quids in!
Long tail search terms tend to be a lot less competitive so it is easier to quickly find your website ranking within the money positions in search engines.

Long tails search terms also have the advantage of bringing customers to your website who already have a good idea of what it is they want to buy. For example, if someone typed in a search for “football kits” then they are more likely to be in a browsing mindset, not quite sure what they are looking for and possibly even looking for something your website does not offer like say American football kits. But if they type in the exact name of the product and land on your website’s page which is targeted specifically towards it, then the chance is that they are ready to buy and are just shopping around for the best price. If that’s your website then you have a sale.

Conclusion

Optimising your website just for a few competitive search terms can be a risky business. If it works it can reap rewards but very quickly you can find your website has dropped in rankings and is no longer receiving the traffic. You should support these competitive search terms with long tail search terms to help increase the availability of your website within search engine results. By doing this you may soon find that the majority of your visitors are finding your website through the long tail search terms.

Ps. Hopefully you found this blog post by visiting Google and typing in something like “long tail search engine optimising”