For those of you who have had some experience with search engine optimization, whether organic or paid, you most likely have come across the term “keyword” and its importance in search engine optimization. Keywords are the words that searchers use to locate things on the internet using the search engines and online advertisers assume these keywords and strategically place them in their web sites and when used properly and tactically, the search engines may place you on top of the results list.
Keywords are actually divided into two major divisions – short tail keywords and long tail keywords. Long term “keywords”, or otherwise known as narrow keywords or just plain ‘keywords’, according to Chris Anderson “is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords where a long tail keyword is something like ‘Small Business Web Design’ while a short wail keyword is something like ‘Web Design’. So the difference between the two types of keywords basically boils down to the number of competitors an online advertiser would have because they command a huge proportion of the searched that are going to come the search engines’ way.
For SEO professionals, long tail keywords offers a great opportunity for cost effective, efficient, and most of the time, a more targeted approach in online advertising, a thing that baffles online marketing neophytes because for newcomers, the obvious choice for keywords would be the most used ones which would perceptibly bring in more website traffic, the penultimate goal of SEO subscribers. Well, the truth in it all is, statistically, yes, the more popular keywords will reel in more visitors but the number of websites using the same popular keywords automatically dissipate and spread out the visitors into different sites so if you do not have enough funds to take hold of a specific keyword, then your website might end up with only a handful of traffic in a day – a losing strategy.
That is why for SEO, if you are not a big player and you do not have the unlimited funds like the big multinational companies out there in order for you to hog a specific keyword, then the best option with the least number of competitors would be the long tail keywords. And if you play your cards right, you may even end up on top of the search engines’ list for these long tail keywords with very few competition, allowing your site free unaltered traffic, a much more targeted demographics.
And because the traffic that these long tail keywords are more targeted, the conversion rate would be higher compared to that of the regular keywords.
