Have you ever heard of long tail keywords? They are keywords that are down at the end of a search result listing. Mistakingly, a lot of newcomers to SEO believe that focusing on using long-tail keywords is pointless and a complete waste of time. In reality, since there is less competition with these particular keywords, you will find them a lot easier to rank with, even if less people are using these keywords to preform searches.
For example, if you run a weight loss website, trying to rank with keywords such as “Weight Loss” will be absolutely difficult if not impossible to do. This is because there is so much competition in that niche doing the very same thing. So, to avoid wasting time (and money) try going another route, such as the long tail keyword tactic I just mentioned.
The first step is to find a variety of keywords that you can target. An easy way to do this is by using WordTracker (or similar programs). This will help you locate long tail keywords that don’t have as much competition.
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
If you search for a keyword such as “Weight Loss”, you will quickly discover that there are over 15,000 searches a month on this kyword alone. However, if you type these keywords into Google’s search engine (Google.com), you will see that the competition is stiff, in fact there are over 50 million websites in that niche.
This means that you will be competing against other webmasters who are targeting the very same keywords that you are. Of course they want to focus on the main, popular keywords because those are the words that people are manually typing into the search engines looking for relating websites. The problem is that the marketplace is so crowded that you will have little chance of actually moving ahead of these guys.. the quicker you figure that out and focus on finding a different route to take, the better your efforts will be.
So, to start find a keyword that still gets used but is not as popular. In our example, if you are in the weight loss industry, perhaps the keywords “weight loss frustration” would be an easy long-tail combination to go with. Use WordTracker to see if it’s worth your while. Once you have chosen your first long-tail keyword, go to Google and type it in. Check how many advertisers show up (on the right side of the Google results window) when you enter in this keyword combination. Look at the main results as well to determine what you are up against. If you notice that a lot of the main results are sub-pages of a website rather than the main page, you’re onto something as search engines are not ranked as high as main pages of sites. This will make it a lot easier for you to knock it out of place and show up in that spot instead.
Be sure to check out the PR (Page Rank) of the first few websites in the search engine results page as well. This can help you determine the popularity of that particular site/page (the higher the PR Rank, the more popular it is). Page Ranks are determined by a number of factors including incoming links from external websites.
If the first few pages that appear contain a low page rank, once again, you’re onto something. If you aren’t sure how to determine the Page Rank of a particular website, there is a real handy FireFox plugin that you might want to download. It will show you not only the Page Rank of individual websites but also incoming links (from Google, Yahoo, etc), the age of the domain and even the WHOIS information.
It’s called SEOQuake and it’s available at: http://www.seoquake.com/
Jake Riley is the administrator of Memberzilla.com, a website focusing on helping webmasters build profitable membership websites while protecting their product download files from unauthorized distribution. The Memberzilla Membership Software is the Internet Marketers’ choice for building and managing professional membership communities. Software features the ability to create unlimited OTO pages, autoresponder integration, instant forums, AdSense modules, WordPress Integration and more. Visit http://www.memberzilla.com for details.