newb questions about long tail keywords.

its all theory to me at this point, but you might find this thread I started a few days ago interesting.

You should come up with a criteria to filter your list down to a manageable level. Starting out, it's not a good idea to try to target too many keywords at once. For a new site I don't have an article written for a term with less than 1000 exact searches a month, and I have an acceptable limit of phrase/title competition that I use to filter other phrases out.

Try to decide how many you think is reasonable; five or ten, I would suggest to start. Pick those that have a reasonable search volume along with a reasonably easy chance to rank. Keep in mind a given keyword in the #1 spot is going to give you 25%-50% of the traffic for that term assuming you have written a decent title and description.

You can always add more content to a site later or even build out another site in the same niche targeting slightly different keywords. You definitely don't have to have hundreds of pages to rank and make money. It will likely be an immense amount of work to try to rank for hundreds of keywords, and a tighter focus will get you results faster.

Any site with decent content and a varied linking strategy should get some traffic for other longtails you aren't specifically targeting. When that happens, you can build another page optimized for that keyword if you want.

I have tested with web 2.0 sites in multiple niches that it is quite possible to rank a single page for multiple phrases. I have a few hubpages that I created each around two or three longtails and have ranked them in #1 for most of these.

For your last question: yes. Don't ignore the short tail but don't expect results for those very fast. Work on ranking your chosen longtails, and you improve your chances of ranking for broader keywords.

knockout91 said:

So, i've found that its perhaps better to rank highly for a lot of long tail keywords rather than go for short tail keywords (which are a lot harder to rank highly for and are not focussed enough to convert consistently).

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I am just wondering if you guys have been keeping track of what g*ogle has been up to lately and wondering what you all think about the new G*ogle.com search feature that was launched in the US and will soon be spreading over the whole internet like wildfire.

You see the chatter on various SEO pod-casts is that the new feature is going to hurt, if not kill, long tail keywords.

I am sure there is a lot of people doing testing right now, buying shorter keyword .com domains hoping to find a quick fix. This really has caused a bit of an uproar with a lot of advertisers and in the end it is G*ogle who monetizing their ad-space (impression wise) even more... Good move G*oogle

I think anyone with great first page results on common keywords is going to see a natural spike from all this, and yes I do think long tails will suffer a lot from it.

How this plays out is hard to predict... G*ogle could take it down within a month claiming it was just a test but don't count on it.

I believe that the "medium tail" (3-5 words) will increase as ultra broad keyword and long tail traffic decrease.... We will see. I could always dump SEO because I'm not going to spend 5 years building an "authority" website to get ranked.

My 2c

knockout91 said:

Yeah, i heard about the new 'instant' feature. It is an absolute travesty.
You see, i'm just counting on google taking it down. But if it doesn't then i'm fucked basically.

Will this mean a hell of a lot of people will be fighting over medium tail keywords and therefore it'll be a hell of a lot harder to rank highly for ANYTHING?

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YES....

This may open up a whole new field of optimization, trying to get your product/company/whatever as a "instant" result when the user starts typing something specific, as how one would do that, I have no idea.
I am however spending some time into trying to find out how and to get a head start on the competition.

I have heard it discussed that the impact is likely to affect small and medium sized business advertisers the most.
However, it was also mentioned that small and medium businesses would look to take their advertising elsewhere if their ROI was impacted as a result.

The overall picture could therefore be that Google is trying to squeeze out the small and medium business advertisers to lure in corporate ones with $100 million annual advertising budgets to use on their search network.

This all could be great news for Bing and the other 2nd tier engines as it could deliver more customers to them, but at the same time increase profit for Google by means of there "instant" results search method.
If this is the case, it will stay in place as Google is aiming to increase their profit and are not concerned if they lose a few thousand low yielding advertisers.

When doing keyword research what I actually do is trying to search the keyword and g00gle and look at the site in the top position, then deciding if I can outrank that site or not. I don't bother much with long tail or short tail keyword.