SEO: Going for long tail keywords

A lot of people simply assume that to have a successful website, when it comes to search engine optimisation, you need to target only the high traffic, high volume, keywords.

That’s a great theory if you can manage to get top rankings for those “short tail” keywords, but for many smaller websites, the chances of that happening are slim, to non-existent. Let’s face it, a small business website will have a lot of trouble ranking for competitive keywords which are dominated by the larger web players.

So what do you do? Well going after long tail keywords is a great SEO strategy. If you do not know what “long tail” keywords are, let me give you an example. A “short tail” keyword would be something like “movies”. A long tail search would be something like “movies I can download to my PC”. It seems like quite a difference, and it is, but there are millions of long tail searches conducted each day. Don’t think that you’ll only be able to get traffic to your website by focusing on the “big” terms, understand that there are many users who will be searching for many more specific terms. If you can develop your website to try and capture these “niche” searches, then not only will you continue to grow your traffic, but you will also find that you can get a lot more highly targeted visitors.