I have a new website and I am choosing keywords to optimize for. The website is for a pool service company based in Las Vegas. Some people would start optimizing for pool service. I check google and there are millions of sites containing information about pool service. I think to myself that although it is possible to get at the top of google for pool service with a lot of time and effort I am looking for a much faster result. This is where the long tail comes in.
Instead of optimizing for pool service lets get more specific. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use location or geo targeting. The company that this site is for is based in Las Vegas, so let’s target Las Vegas pool service. This is much less competitive and for an experienced optimizer a top ten spot in google can be archived in a couple of months.
So a couple of months go by and you are at the top or close to it. Your sites rank is going up steadily and you are feeling ambitious. Once you are able to get a page other than your home page in the top ten for Las Vegas Pool Service you can start optimizing you home page for a more competitive keyword or phrase. This will allow you to keep you traffic from Las Vegas Pool Service and start gaining on the sites dominating the keyword pool service.
In conclusion don’t try to tack the on your first go around. Let your site rank for some specific phrases as you build your rank and your natural traffic base. Then go after it.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:36 pm A good way to make you SEO phrases stand out to search engines is to put the phrase in bold whenever it appears in your content, or italic and headers are even better.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:14 am Using the long tail for smaller companies can often prove to be far more profitable than trying to compete on the broader search term. A travel company a friend of mine works for uses geo targeting, so instead of just cheap holidays, they have phrases for each destination that are offering such offers. This proves more effective since the click throughs from links brought up by those searches bring visitors interested in holidays in those locations, a more focussed group of site visitors, which results in a higher conversion rate.
July 29th, 2007 at 2:11 pm Have you heard of Hittail which will help you to find your long tail keywords? Sign up for free and then all you have to do is install a small snippet of code on your pages which will log all the long tail search terms for you. Very useful.