What are Long Tail Key Words?

Long Tail Keywords Explained.

The phrase long tail keywords refers to a strategy of targeting less competitive niches by stringing together several words, as opposed to only single worded keywords. If you are reviewing a diet pill product, rather than using simply "diet pills" as your keyword, string together several other words to create a long tail keyword, such as "diet pills that work."

For small businesses and affiliate bloggers, using long tail keywords is a great strategy, arguably the only successful strategy, for attracting traffic. For reference sake, consider an similar marketing strategy in the physical, non-internet world. In real world advertising, if you wanted to promote a new horse club, then you'd most likely put your signs in locations where people are interested in horses. Even though there are many more people in say NY City, your horse sign would probably get buried amongst the other advertisements, and wouldn't catch the eye of horse enthusiasts. In contrast, if you hung your signs at local barns, with a small but specific traffic area of horse-likers, you are much more likely of getting a response back. In contrast to long tail keywords, short keywords are useful for broad scale advertising, but really only have success for large businesses or bloggers who already attract heavy traffic.

However, you also don't want to use keywords that are too long, thereby targeting a market that is virtually nil. Hence, you want to find a balance with your keywords, which are neither too popular, nor too unpopular. Fortunately you don't have to rely on chance because there are several websites that help you test your keywords. For this, I usually use seotools. The procedure is pretty simple, and self-explanatory. Enter a string of words related to your target market into the search engine, and a list of results will be produced that rates your phrase and many other similar twists. Now, focus on the "Overall daily est" and, if you are a small business or blog, locate keywords that generate anywhere between 100-200 hits daily.