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Long tail keywords - What are they?
diogenes
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24 Mar 07 12:00 am

Long tail keywords - What are they?

I have viewed the lessons on SEO and long tail keywords, but I am still a bit confused.

Being a great lover of 'things Greek' I would be very keen to put up a cluster of Greek niche sites - targeting Greek ex pats, English speaking Greeks living in Greece, and those non-Greeks with a love of Greece and her people. I realize that the main revenue source will probably be from Adsense as there doesn't appear to be too many Greek affiliate sites out there (although Amazon does have a wealth of material).

But back to the keywords issue. If one takes the main search term as say Greek Travel, long tail keyword terms could be Greek Island Travel, Greek Air Travel, Travel on Greek Ferries etc. My understanding of a long-tail keyword is that it has one or more of the elements of the main search term in it. If that is correct then Mykonos Island Travel, Crete Travel, could also be long tail keywords in the same way that Greek Cooking, Greek Music, Greek Culture etc. are. Am I correct in arriving at this conclusion? Or, must each long tail keyword contain both of the elements of the main search term?

Also, with regards each page Mark suggested perhaps one primary search term phrase and one secondary. He also mentioned using words similar in meaning. Hellenic Transport for instance is closely related to 'Greek Travel' - would that be what he is referring to? Should this also be a regularly searched for term or could it just be sprinkled into the mix to capture a few more people known to be searching on similar terms?

I have my own domain with three blogs (two automated) in place, but these are unrelated to this subject. Tomorrow I will be asking if it is possible to have a review undertaken of one of these sites.

For the Greek project I was thinking of creating over time a number of subdomains; each with a central hub and 'spokes' out to related sites and blogs ... and to start the ball rolling by putting up one blog on one of these niches and then extending out from around that. Could you also give me your thoughts on this please?

Many thanks

Dale
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chatyak86
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24 Mar 07 12:22 am

 Hey Dale,

You are correct in thinking long tail keywords contain the elements of a main term. Long tail just simply refers to the nature of the keyphrase, be it, it is longer than the general terms. I would consider a long tail keywords anything that is three words or more, some may disagree with me but that is what I feel. Two word keyphrases are pretty general as it stands and a 1 word keyword is extremely general.
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diogenes
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24 Mar 07 4:53 am

 I have just spent a bit of time pulling out some long tail keywords for the search terms Paintball Guns (and in quotes) and Greek Travel (and in quotes) and their keyword derivatives. On the search term "pink paintball guns for cheap" things started to look very exciting what with a Keyword Effectiveness Rating of 729,000, a competition rating of under 300 (actually 0) and a count of 27. Wordtracker advised this was an excellent keyword to target ... "a gift in fact".

For the Greek Travel long tail keyword "santorini greece hiking" I received the same pronouncement. A KEI analysis of 900,000, and a low competition rating - under 300 (actually 0 ) and a competition rating of 30. On that basis I felt I should give some serious consideration to narrowing in to a niche site revolving around Santorini using this keyword phrase.

Also .. putting up a page on my Cheap Paintball Guns blog targeting the "pink paintball guns for cheap" term.

I have had Adwords Analyser for some time and thought to run the terms through there. I don't profess to be proficient with it, but in my searches take note of the percentage of results over searches - the lower the figure the better. Using both their Overture results and Google Sandbox I found that absolutely no-one was searching on these terms.

I am left asking myself then ... how come? How does this reconcile with what Wordtracker is recommending?

Any explanation on this would be appreciated.


Dale
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chatyak86
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24 Mar 07 5:09 am
diogenes wrote:I have just spent a bit of time pulling out some long tail keywords for the search terms Paintball Guns (and in quotes) and Greek Travel (and in quotes) and their keyword derivatives. On the search term "pink paintball guns for cheap" things started to look very exciting what with a Keyword Effectiveness Rating of 729,000, a competition rating of under 300 (actually 0) and a count of 27. Wordtracker advised this was an excellent keyword to target ... "a gift in fact".

For the Greek Travel long tail keyword "santorini greece hiking" I received the same pronouncement. A KEI analysis of 900,000, and a low competition rating - under 300 (actually 0 ) and a competition rating of 30. On that basis I felt I should give some serious consideration to narrowing in to a niche site revolving around Santorini using this keyword phrase.

Also .. putting up a page on my Cheap Paintball Guns blog targeting the "pink paintball guns for cheap" term.

I have had Adwords Analyser for some time and thought to run the terms through there. I don't profess to be proficient with it, but in my searches take note of the percentage of results over searches - the lower the figure the better. Using both their Overture results and Google Sandbox I found that absolutely no-one was searching on these terms.

I am left asking myself then ... how come? How does this reconcile with what Wordtracker is recommending?

Any explanation on this would be appreciated.


Dale


If you use http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com you will see that pink paintball guns for cheap is searched 47 times a day (this is split between MSN, Google, and Yahoo).

Google does not tend to show much of a search count for very targeted and low searched words, however that is not to say they don't count. Those targeted words can convert very well. This is why wordtracker is neat because it digs laterally as well as deep and find terms that people search. If you incorporate all of these long tail words on your articles/pages you will see rankings!

Hope this helps some...
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diogenes
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26 Mar 07 7:02 am

 Many thanks for your helpful advice Adrian. On that basis I am going to have a little play with the keywords which have been recommended.

I will put up a post tomorrow asking if a review of my Cheap-Paintball-Guns blog could be undertaken, but look at doing a post or two first.

As I mentioned this is an automated blog largely reliant on RSS feeds with a 6 hour turnover. I ran the blog through an SEO tool and one of the things it highlighted was the number of outbound links - it was suggested that I had too many. This is of course increasing with the feeds being renewed every 6 hours (these have monetised links), so I am looking to perhaps extend the turnover timeframe out to 12 or 24 hours to 'slow things down a bit'.

I can edit each feed and do this to assign categories. Am I able to legally alter the content of a feed or could there be copyright issues involved there?
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