Staska.Net

Sharing my ‘Net life bits

Long tail keyword posts for traffic and rankings

with 10 comments

One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers goes like this:

  • Find Long Tail (rarely used, uncompetitive) keywords through which new readers get to your blog in search engines.
  • Write more posts using these keywords, to improve your rankings and get more readers

I may be missing something, but I really don’t understand how this can work/help?

Long tail keywords are called that way for a cause. Almost nobody uses them. And if nobody searches for them, how will they bring new readers to my blog?

OK, you may say. Just use a lot of them, post a lot and if each LT keyword will bring a reader a week, soon you’ll be looking at a steady stream of new visitors from search engines.

But I already do that with every post. And you do that too. Every post on every blog is filled with the combinations of words that someone somewhere looking for something might use someday.

So how would you advice me to blog consciously using good long tail keywords? And what exactly the phrase “good long tail keyword” means? If it is “good”, is it still a “long tail” keyword?

How will more posts, with long tail keywords through which readers already found my blog, improve my search engine rankings? If they found me, there’s a very good chance that I already rank well for the keyword. And if they had to dig to the tenth page in Google to get to me, will more blog posts with the same keyword help me get to the fifth?

I currently hold #1 spot in Google for “Chitika RPU” – real long tail keyword (899 Google search results, 3 visitors during last week). Will more posts on “Chitika RPU” get me 5 more places in Top 10 Google SERP?

Or I’m #5 for “adsense earnings down 04 2007″. Will a post on why AdSense earnings are down this April get me to the #1? Somehow I doubt it.

I actually plan to do a post on why your AdSense earnings can go down. But that’s because I think it’s an interesting topic, not because it’s a long tail keyword that I want to improve my rankings on.

So what’s the point of doing more posts with long tail keywords that you already rank for?

I can see how it can work for some websites – you find LT keyword that is easy to rank for. Make ten sites on 10 different domains and own first Google results page for that keyword. Rinse and repeat and soon your are looking at some nice traffic streams.

But  for a single blog? Am I missing something obvious here?

Written by Staska

April 19th, 2007 at 11:30 am

Posted in Blogtips

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  • http://www.scriptbloggers.com ChrisBoyce

    I guess because;

    Using long tail keywords will get you around 5-10 visitors a day (on average) say – ebay affiliates program project (i was #1 for that a while ago)

    Using Ebay affiliate will probably bag you no visitors because it’s already filled with big companies/blogs who have been up there for so an extremely long amount of time.

    Conclusion.

    5-10 visitors a day extra is better than none.

    It’s my experience anyways.

  • Staska

    Well, I am not against long tail keywords. We all use them and they usually come in naturally in our posts. And they bring good traffic in aggregate.

    I was talking about finding in your logs the long tail keywords that you already rank for and that attract visitors to your blog. And then doing more posts stuffed with them.

    Will one more post with “ebay affiliates program project” in it bring your additional 5-10 visitors, or help you keep #1 spot? How about writing 10 more posts with it? Would you be now getting 50-100 visitors for “ebay affiliates program project”?

  • http://www.scriptbloggers.com ChrisBoyce

    ahh good question, i think a post with a similar title and the repetition of ebay, affiliate, program and project in my post (not always together) then it will help keep the number one spot.

    I don’t think it will bring in more posting about the same thing many times if it’s using a long tail keyword as already it’s a long tail keyword so the traffic is obviously going to be low

    I never bother with extreme SEO as i think it degrades your post if all your concentrating on is your keywords and ranking high i just write then read it over then publish.

  • http://www.miriguy.com Chee Kui

    Long tail keywords would be beneficial if you are looking forward to sell something, because people tend to type in more specific keywords into the search engines if they’re ready to buy something ;)

  • http://www.45n5.com 45n5

    Your premise is that ALL long tail keywords have little traffic. I don’t agree with that.

    Yes you rank for some long tail keywords, just not ones worth ranking for.

    Any monkey can make up your their own “long tail keyword” but it doesn’t mean anything, for instance

    http://www.google.com/search?q=foodlemonkey

    (if you didn’t get the joke I’m the monkey ranking in that serp)

    The gold is a long tail keyword WITH traffic, and they are out there, I’ve only found a few unfortunately.

  • Staska

    Your premise is that ALL long tail keywords have little traffic. I don’t agree with that.

    Yep.There sure can be some low competition/good traffic keywords.

    Whether they are long tail or not, depends on your definition of what a long tail is.

    They definitely are in the long tail competition wise. But are they LT traffic wise?

  • http://www.45n5.com 45n5

    Long Tail Competition
    Head for traffic

    equals a very nice, warm, cozy place to be.

    Or

    Long Tail Competition
    ANY traffic already making you money is worth going after harder

    maybe :lol:

  • http://www.osworld.biz Oli

    I came here to post the same as 45n5 – there are plenty of long tail keywords you could write posts for – I’m sure I wouldn’t have much trouble ranking for “cherry flavoured garden shed on the moon”, but if nobody is searching for it then that’s no good. The long tail phrases you want to targt are the ones that have a fair amount of people searching for them, but not many sites that are optimized for them.

    Also, there’s no point in attracting visitors you can’t use – even if there were a lot of people searching for that “garden shed” phrase, writing a post about it on this blog would be a waste of time, because they wouldn’t be interested in the content, wouldn’t subscribe and wouldn’t buy anything – 10 targetted visitors would be much better than 1000 visitors who were looking for something else…

  • http://www.staska.net Staska

    No argument from me here. And also no question that well implemented long tail keyword strategy for AIS sites can be a gold mine.

    My rant here was more concerned with the blogs and optimizing them for the LT keywords found in their logs, for which I see no reason.

  • http://www.osworld.biz Oli

    Fair enough – in that case I’m 100% agreed