Long Tail Keywords Rock

Researching Long tail Keywords

A common understanding among marketers is that in order to develop a successful online company affiliate marketers need to be collecting or targeting hundreds of keywords. While this used to be true, it is without truth today.

This belief blocks marketers, sometimes new and seasoned alike, from coming to grips with the essential purpose. They expend an abnormal amount of time researching and culling through endless amounts of keywords, long tail keywords and variations of them. They are looking for the “Big Prize.” The simple truth is that you can look for too long. Don’t look for that perfect catch. Find a suitable niche and dive in!

As I indicated in the text above, there was a period when more was better. You simply identified as many keywords as you could and did your best to corral them on your site. It did work like that but it was a simpler time. Back when the Internet was young, you would fill your meta tags with them and it would lead to a better ranking and, of course, traffic.

This worked in the early years of this decade, but the heyday of money coming from heaven (or in this case, Google AdWords) is done. We need to adapt to the fact that the algorithm Google uses is much refined today.

The landscape of the Net has changed and in order to survive and then to make a profit at affiliate Marketing, we have had to adapt with it and also become more sophisticated in our methods. The term “targeted” isn’t just representative of the kind of traffic you want today, it also refers to your niche research and how you find the proper TARGETED keywords.

The strategy of loading your website with long tail keywords and seeing what kind of traffic they generated, a kind of wait and see approach, doesn’t have a chance of success in today’s modern Internet market. Much as a football team looks for weakness and exploit it with a good play, marketers are always looking for leg-up in the Net markets. And just like defense, Google seeks to counteract the play with changes in their operating plans and by the introduction of new or adapted scoring systems. They are wise to us but we are a pretty savvy lot as well!

What will get the job completed today is the long tail keyword. This is a group of words strung together that form a search, an idea or concept. A simple keyword is “Health.” If you input this keyword, you would find that a broad match would return over ONE BILLION pages. But if you were to run Health Care for the Elderly,” you have isolated a much narrower niche that returns far fewer pages. This is a long tail keyword and is usually expressed as a minimum of 2 and a maximum of ten words.

Long tail keywords allow you to control your niche. Yes, they have fewer searches and because of that fewer people looking, but these are hungry motivated searchers who are zeroing in on just what they want. And you as the marketer need to lock in as well on the right keyword groups so you can be there to satisfy your customers desires and then make one sale after another because you now dominate your niche.

This then is the image of today’s market: focused long tail keywords arrowing in on the exact need of a Internet market that you located and exploited. Using long tail keywords you can actually play in the playground of the “big industry dogs” because, from their vantage point, your niche appears insignificant to them; sometimes they are actually oblivious to the potential that we as Internet marketers can harvest right under their nose.

The time of using a bunch of keywords placed, lets face it, rather haphazardly on a site and gaining easy ranking and therefore traffic are HISTORY. We are now working and living in a much more sophisticated Net, and a market place that requires flexibility and vision of purpose. So go out there! Identify your long tail keywords, dominate and control your market and make mountains of money!

If you would want more information on how to locate long tail keywords and the computer programs related to finding you market, try Keyword Elite 2 and SEnuke. Both are wonderful products. SEnuke is the more robust in terms of things it can do, but Keyword Elite 2 excels at finding those critical long tail keywords.