Long Tail Keywords – The Web Traffic Mine

Using a tool like Web Analytics to analyze a website up to its root will not only give you real time comprehensive data, but it can also surprise you with its analysis of traffic generating keywords. What you are most likely to find is that traffic generated from untargeted keywords tends to outweigh traffic from targeted keywords. Now, do not let this discourage you from optimizing your website for top keywords. Rather, in addition to optimization you should also consider the benefits of using both short and long tail keywords.

Short Tail Keywords (STK) is the popular choice for webmasters in their quest to land visitors which generates traffic and leads. Generally, a website will be focused on 20-30 popular keywords that are used to search for a product relevant to a particular webpage. While there is nothing wrong with this practice, it should not be the only method employed.

Research has shown that Long Tail Keywords (LTK) can be more beneficial if it is used efficiently. Compared to STK’s, LTK’s are easier to rank, and the time it takes for popular keywords to break into the top 100 of SERPs, they would have already started to drive in a proportionately large amount of traffic to the website. Visitors arriving at a website using LTK searches are looking for a specific product for a specific need. As a result they are more likely to turn into a sale than others.

It is somewhat easy to generate long tail keywords. Just by using a combination of popular keywords, general meaning phrases, a call to action phrase, and geo specific phrases you can arrive at some good LTK’s. Top apple seller Kansas, best pizza maker Dakota, Dan Brown books at discount, etc are good examples of LTK’s.