subject: Targeting Long Tail Search Traffic [print this page] As the SEO services are evolving constantly, the clients are demanding to be at the top of the list. For many enterprise companies, long tail keyword traffic is important because it drives the traffic to their site. This article provides recommendations to increase the amount of total targeted, organic search traffic to the website.
Long Tail Search Traffic
According to Ian Lurie, definition of long tail search traffic is "Specific, niche search phrases, usually more than two words in length, that offer a low competition, low search volume and high searcher intent." People type exact and complete queries into Google, so creating a Hub with a highly specific title and subtitles, will be advantageous.
Importance of Long Tail Search Traffic
On analyzing the traffic patterns of enterprise clients, companies offering SEO service in India significant rankings for highly competitive words is evident among them. Even with the advent of instant search, auto-fill, spell correction, and other mechanisms that had an effect on reducing the number of long tail searches, the majority of keyword traffic is based on long tail permutations of their targeted keywords. This is why targeting long tail traffic is so important.
SEO Practices that Target the Long Tail.
Understanding Keyword Landscape
Understanding common long tail permutations of competitive keywords in SEO India services, as well as common patterns the people use, helps in optimizing those keywords and patterns. First of all a basic research is to be conducted to get a better understanding of the keyword landscape. It gives a good sense of the overall topography of the competitive landscape.
The keyword landscape can be better known by using:
* Analytics data
* PPC data
* Internal search data
* competitive intelligence
* Tools like Google AdWords and Wordtracker.
A typical example of this can be seen in the sale of T-Shirts where there is some search traffic around "red t shirts. It may warrant creating a page about Red T Shirts if you have the inventory to support that kind of a page. Adding different color names to the high ranking page about T-shirts does the trick. In many cases, adding long tail keyword permutations to a page that ranks well for a term can produce significant results. It just depends on how competitive the long tail permutations are.
Creating Meaningful, Descriptive Page Titles
In page titles, only the first 65 characters will be displayed in search results, and the keywords found after that will be recognized and counted in the ranking algorithms of major search engines. By placing less important words after the 65th character the users attention could be captured in those first 65 characters. This helps to target more keyword permutations and also gives the search engines more information about what the page is really about. The page titles must be useful for both users and engines by conveying appropriate and relevant information. The adoption of these methods prevents the title from being flagged in Google Webmaster Tools for being too short or long.
Infusing Content and Internal Links with Keyword Variations
The long tail keyword permutations to be targeted must be present in the content of the page to be ranked. Varying the internal link text that points to any given page is a wise option. Experts offering SEO service in India suggest that a variety of internal site links with different long tail keywords pointing to the page targeting on the keywords is a good practice. They should be linked from other pages on the site relevant to those specific long tail keywords. Only the link text from the first link found in source code between any two pages is counted in Google's algorithm.
Leverage User Generated Content
Infuse the pages with user-generated content like comments, reviews etc. This type of content naturally targets long tail keyword permutations. User-generated content can be an amazing source of long tail keywords including model numbers, color variations, specific applications, or problem issues. It may help to distinguish the content and makes it more valuable to users and engines.
Conclusion
Long tail keywords are valuable but not highly competitive which makes them a great resource to use in website Meta tags and article writings. This article presented some of the tactics that help to target long tail traffic. Hope this article gave a better understanding in why long tail keywords are so important.
