I wrote a recent article about what the long tail keywords are, their advantages and disadvantages, but now I would like to explain a little bit the process I use to find long tail keywords worth targeting. You’ll develop content that targets main keywords but the base of every website should be an enormous number of long tail keywords.

The Process of Finding Long Tail Keywords

Just like in the case of main keywords, long tail keywords have to offer a decent search volume/month and also be relevant. Once you decided that a main keyword is relevant to your website then almost all the long tail keywords that are derived from it should be relevant to your website.

Before I tell you the process of how to research for long tail keywords, here are the tools I’m using: Google Keyword External Tool (because it has information on any language or country), Google Sktool and two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Searches.

And now, here are the 5 steps that I take in order to find long tail keywords:

1. I start with Google Keyword External. The first search is just using single words. For example for my market I start with words like: seo, keyword, keywords, content and so on. Is very important to let the tool suggest related terms that people are searching. These terms are really the starting point of my search. The same method can be applied using Google Sktool.  I choose one main keyword and then go to step 2.
2. I perform a search on Google for that main keyword. The things that I pay attention are the general competition and title competition. These numbers play an important role in deciding if a keyword is worth targeting or not. So write this down: you’ll have to compare it with the data for the long tail keywords.
3. I use the Wonder Wheel to see what other keywords people searched after the main keyword. Watch the competition and when you find something under 1 million or maximum 2 million you can go for it. Write it down.
4. I also use Related Searches to see what the search engine says that are the related keywords other people searched (these searches are not necessarily performed after searching for your keyword). Again look at the competition and make your own decision: is this keyword relevant and also have a decent competition.
5. I return to Google Keyword External Tool with the long tail keywords that I found. Keep in mind that these keywords were definitely searched by someone but this is not enough. So, you’re checking to see if the tool says it has Not Enough Data or shows you a number. Depending on your market you choose to target a long tail keyword or not. Sometimes a search volume of 100/month can be enough, other times you’ll need a few thousands. It’s relative and depends on the overall search volume trends from your market.

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The concept of long tail keyword usually refers to keywords composed of more than 3 words. It can be something from 3 to 4, 5 or more words. Targeting this kind of keywords has its own advantages and in the case of many websites the long tail keywords deliver most of their traffic.

The downside of targeting long tail keywords is the fact that you really have to concentrate on large numbers of long tail keywords. The reason is because the number of monthly searches for a long tail keyword is usually much lower than the searches for a competitive keyword.

Here are some of the advantages of long tail keywords

1. The competition is much lower than in the case of main keywords. So it’s much easier to rank well and faster.
2. Higher conversion. The reason for higher conversion is because long tail keywords mean that people know exactly what are looking for.
3. Help with your rankings on main keywords. You usually use long tail keywords related to your main keywords. A good practice would be to use this additional content to link to your other articles. More articles on related themes will boost your ranking.

Major disadvantages

1. Low search volume. Because of the fact that a long tail keyword is so specific few people are searching for it and the more specific it gets the lower the search volume. So you’ll have to pay attention and decide what long tail keyword is worth the effort and what not
2. You need many. Because of the low search volume you’ll need to target many long tail keywords in order to see some benefits.

The Fact

You can’t do it without long tail keywords. Although it has their disadvantages you’ll have no other option. Why? How many main keywords do you think you can target? Not that many. Yes, it can deliver high volumes of traffic but to get that traffic you’ll need to rank well. And you can’t rank well with just one article.

So long tail keywords are not an option: it’s something you have to do. You already write 3 or 4 or maybe 7 times per week. Why not using long tail keywords in your articles?

What say you?

What is your opinion on this? How do you select your long tail keywords? Share your experience and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog and receive my articles in your e-mail.

Only one article with no other links pointing to it will not rank that well. External links are more powerful than internal links but at first you’ll use your own power to boost your content. So, if you’re interested in improving your internal linking to help your rankings, you should continue reading.

What to Do

Let’s say you want to target “body lotions” (201,000 monthly searches globally) and you see that the competition is 9,730,000 pages on Google, from which only 523,000 target those keywords in their titles. If you write only one article you won’t stand a chance to rank well.

The solution would be to write more than one article and to target related keywords. Here is how to find related keywords or other keywords that people searched after the keyword you wish to target, in an easy way.

The quickest way is to use two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Keywords. Perform a search and you’ll have the option to display on the left side of your screen a tab with different features to improve your search.

Wonder Wheel shows you what other keywords were searched after a user typed a keyword and Related Keywords shows you keywords that Google consider it to be related with your keyword. So, here is a quick and efficient way to find other related keywords that you could use to develop more articles.

And now, for the grand finale: you don’t just go and create more articles on a related subject and just wait for miracles to happen. You link them so that you’ll add relevancy. For example you have an article that targets “body lotions” and you want to strongly state the fact that you really talk about “body lotions” in that article.

An easy way to achieve that would be develop more articles that target related keywords and link to the first one. Here are some ideas for some related keywords that I found just by using the Wonder Wheel:

-          Body bath lotion: 110,000 searches/month globally and a competition on Google of 2,500,000

-          Shower gel: 1,000,000 searches/month globally and a competition on Google of 3,240,000

-          Aloe vera lotion: 14,800 searches/month globally and a competition on Google of 1,490,000

What Not to Do

As a short tip: don’t link all the articles by using the same anchor text. That is why you use the Wonder Wheel and Related Keywords: to find other words that for the search engines are related. Using synonyms (or related keywords) to link to an article will look more natural to search engines rather than using the same text.

If you have more links on a page pointing to the same article, you should be aware of the fact that search engines only count one link.

What do you think of all this? Share your experience!

If you’re the kind of person that wants to know what their market is talking about on Twitter then this quick tip might interest you!

I see many articles talking about so many tools that can track keywords on Twitter and send you e-mails with the specified tweets but I’m the kind that wants to keep it simple. I don’t like to use many tools: I already have to use many tools in order to provide my SEO services and I just want to limit it.

So, here is a quick tip to stay in touch with your market on Twitter. Go on search.twitter.com and search for the keywords you’re interested in. Then, on the right side of the screen you’ll see a link called “Feed to this query”.

Right click it and Copy Link Location. Then, log in into your Google Reader account and add a subscription with that feed. As a good practice create a Folder in Google Reader called Twitter and place your Twitter feeds there. This way you don’t have to think about which tool did you used, or to receive to many e-mails.

What you think of it? Share your ideas in comments bellow!

The way search engines provide search results has change dramatically in the last years. Custom search is something that you need to be aware, together with custom social search results. In case you didn’t knew until now, here are some factors that influence the search results:

-          Location, time of day, browser settings, profile settings and preferences

Also, there is a new feature from Google where you can link your social accounts and when you perform a search Google will also display results from your social network related to your search term. That is why a top ranking on your computer might not even make it to page 10 for someone across the globe.

You can create a special filter, if you’re using Google Analytics to see the rankings for each keyword. Then you can check the country and city, landing page and bounce rate to have a full image of what that keyword is really bringing you. I have a full article about how to create a filter to check your rankings in Google Analytics.

People post comments on blogs and think this is SEO (because they post a link to their website). It’s not. Why? Because 99.99% of these links are nofollow. And in case you don’t know what a nofollow link is here is a short definition: a nofollow link is not pursued by search engines and it doesn’t pass link juice (but retains some of it).

Links that point back to your website are extremely important. This is what makes your website outrank others. Links basically means people that talk about you. Let’s make a short exercise. If you hear the girl that serves coffee talking about stock evolution do you trust what she says? Probably no.

If you pay a photographer to shoot your wedding and he shows up with a common point and shoot camera, do you trust him? Probably no. The conclusion is that it matters who says the words: how trusty is that person.

Now let’s get back to our websites: it’s the same thing. It matters the authority of the websites, the degree of related-subjects, where is the link placed, on what page and what is the actual text of the link.

If we’re talking about top-authority websites then it doesn’t matter if the website has any kind of relevancy to the content on your website. This is the biggest kind of link that you could get.

If we’re talking about normal websites then there are some rules of thumb that you could check to see if it’s really worth the effort to get a link from them:

1. Does your content have any kind of relation to the content posted by the website that will link back to you? Search engines like to see topic related websites linking. The reason is that this way they can assign relevancy points to your content. You say that you target a keyword by placing it in the title and content but search engines can’t evaluate more than that. It needs other websites that already develop some trust to link back to you and tell the search engine that you really “talk” about what you say you talk.
2. What will be the words used for linking. If it’s a word like “here” (used in Read more here…) or other irrelevant word then the quality of the link it’s certainly diminished. The best would be to have the text of the link containing keywords you want to rank for. That is why you should never link to other websites with the keywords you want to rank well for.
3. Where that link would be placed. It’s much more useful for you to have a link from a particular page (placed naturally in context) that talks about a related topic rather than a footer link. A footer link caries low value because it’s not placed in a context: that is why search engines can’t assign any kind of relevancy between your page and the keywords you target (because the point from where you received the link isn’t descriptive enough)

What not to do:

1. Submit your website to web directories that accept all websites with no restriction
2. Submit your website to farm links
3. Build dozens of websites and cross link it (NOTE: if you have a decent number of websites and if there is a relation of topics between them it’s ok to cross link)

If you have something to add or a question, please use the comments bellow. Don’t forget to subscribe if you liked the article.

Did you ever wonder what is going on in your website? What the users click, or what other pages do they visit after seeing a particular article? Here is how you can access that information. First you’ll need an analytic software installed on your website. This article is about how you can view this kind of information in Google Analytics.

Log in into your Google Analytics account and identify in a report the link to a page you’re interested in. Here are some ways to go find a specific page in a report. Go to Content, Top Landing Pages or Content by Title and search for your page. Once you find it click on the link displayed in the table.

A new page will open with few very important links in the right:

1. Navigation Summary. By clicking this link you’ll see what other pages users visited before the specified page and what other pages visited after. Also you’ll see the percentage of users that exit the website.
2. Entrance Sources. The information displayed will let you know how people arrived to that page. From the table that opens choose as secondary information to view Medium. This way you’ll be able to see if the source is a referral, organic search, direct or e-mail.
3. Entrance Keywords. Knowing what keywords sent traffic to that page can be extremely useful. Especially because many times a page might receive traffic from keywords related to the subject but that we didn’t planned to optimize for.
4. Site Overlay. This feature will open your website in a new window with an overlay on top of it from Google. The additional information displayed will tell us, for every page, where users clicked.

Let me know if you find this article useful and what is your opinion or questions on this. Also consider subscribing to the blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

Developing keyword orientated content for your website means to have a vision of the whole. It’s a matter of knowing the main keywords you want to target, the derived long tail keywords for each main keyword, how to use it in articles and how to link articles to get the results you want. Don’t make the mistake of paying too much attention to only one article and not realizing the importance of the whole.

The First Connection

This is basic knowledge for keyword targeting. Choose the keyword you want to target in an article and then make sure you use it in title, first paragraph, anchor text and the content of the page. This is the first connection: having the keyword present in all those places.

When you’ll use the keyword for that page in anchor text link only internally: you don’t want to help other websites outrank you, do you? It’s very important to use the keyword in the first paragraph and also in the rest of the content.

My advice is to use it naturally, as you would do it a real conversation with someone: don’t force it and don’t try to do keyword stuffing or achieve a certain keyword density. Although you follow some technical rules for search engines, in the end you write for people (those that will link back to you if they like your content – so keep this in mind).

Don’t limit the use in content to only the exact keyword: experiment with singular and plural form, synonyms or related words. This way you escape the danger of repeating the keyword too many times.

The Second Set of Actions

You can also use keywords in other places as well, to enforce the relevancy of the page to that specific keyword:

-          Description metatag: although using the keyword here will not improve your rankings it will help in attracting the eye on your link since this piece of information is displayed by search engines right bellow the title of the page and with the keywords in bold

-          URL – using the keyword in the actual URL of the page can have a positive impact on your rankings but it’s not a decisive factor

-          File names, especially images and the ALT property of the images can help with image search or different other file types search

-          Bold and italic text suggest some sort of importance of that text so use it wise

-          Subheading like h1, h2 and h3 can help especially when someone reads your page: it will be easier to follow the main ideas

The Third Factor – Internal Linking

It’s common knowledge that two is greater than one. More pages from your website linked in a logical hierarchy can greatly improve the relevancy of a page to a certain keyword. There are some rules that you need to follow in order to avoid penalties from search engines and to get the results you want:

-          Don’t link with the same anchor text

-          Concentrate on groups of articles: one main keyword and few long tail derived keywords

-          If you link to a page multiple times from the same article search engines will count the link once but you could get some improvement in functionality

-          Use relevant keywords as anchor text

-          Expect benefits from internal linking only when you link between related pages

What do you think about all this? Share your experience and questions in comments bellow.

Google Analytics shows you reports about 3 kinds of traffic: direct, referral and search engine. It’s important to understand how to look at these reports and how to spot problems.

Direct traffic comes from people that type your website address directly in the browser or click on a bookmark.

Referral traffic is traffic send from other websites. This means that you have a link on another website, or you post a link or an article on another website.

Search engine traffic is traffic that your website receives from search engines. Here you can see the non-paid traffic or paid traffic. If you pay for a service like AdWords knowing what paid keywords sent you traffic and what was the bounce rate could be useful.

For paid keywords you can evaluate the landing page relevancy for that keyword by analyzing the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high you should ask yourself if it’s worth paying for those keywords or you should work some more on the landing page to increase the relevancy towards that keyword.

You can also look at All Traffic Sources to see what kind of source send you most of the traffic. In the table you’ll see the source of the traffic followed by its type: /referral, /direct, /email or /organic (traffic from organic rankings on search engines). Looking at all the traffic is a good method to rapidly spot the big areas that need improvement.

While looking to the All Traffic Sources, you’ll see in the right-up corner of the table few visualization options, Views. Choose the forth icon from the left that says Comparison. For all traffic sources you’ll see now its performance compared to the sites average.

This way you can see what traffic source helps your site average performance or its pulling you down. You have different options like Visits, Pages/Visits, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.

NOTE: If your website is a blog then a high Bounce Rate can be normal. You can improve it by writing more articles on the subject and link between content in a natural and logical way.

When you look at the Keyword report an interesting option to View the table is Pivot (right-up corner of the table). For each keyword you’ll see how many visits you received and from what search engine. With this viewing option active you can select to see Visits and Bounce rate and you can see the bounce rate from each search engine, for every keyword. For example I have a keyword that send me traffic with 100% bounce rate from Google and 0% bounce rate from Bing.

Let me know what you think about this article. Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow and if you find it useful please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my content directly in your e-mail.

Usually people talk about SEO and SEM and sometimes they think it’s the same thing. Simply put SEO refers to optimizing your website for ranking on organic searches and SEM refers to getting traffic from PPC, CPC. The big difference between these two methods of getting traffic is this: SEO is more a mid and long term solution with long lasting results while SEM usually provides fast results that stay as long as you pay for the service.

Even if you prefer SEM solutions you should also invest in SEO because in time it could reduce your costs by provide your website with free traffic from organic searches. Another thing that you should know from start is that if you choose organic SEO then you should be aware of white hat techniques and black hat techniques.

Black hat techniques will not get you too far since search engines are better in spotting these things. Anything like hidden text, lots of links in the footer, fake backlinks from websites hosted on the same server or that have the same owner or IP, link farms, css styling that is meant to deceive, all these are black hat techniques.

White hat techniques mainly concentrate on the phrase “provide value to the web”. Usually, if you ask yourself this question you stay on the right track. Still, there are some things that might get you a penalty from search engines although it doesn’t seem that obvious:

-          all of your pages link to the main page of your website with the same keywords

-          many of your pages link to another page of your website with the same keyword

-          reciprocal links

-          too many links to other websites on the same page (might lead to the conclusion of payed links)

Other times you may think that you’re doing SEO when in fact you’re not (common mistakes):

-          all your pages have the same title

-          the keywords from the title are nowhere to be found on the page, anchor text, file names, alt property or subheadings

-          multiple links placed on a page that point to the same page: this might offer good functionality for readers but search engines will count only one link

-   target keywords that you don’t know anything about: competition, monthly searches, related long tail keywords

-   there is no sitemap or analytic software

-   pages have few text content

-   pages don’t have descriptive titles and are not keyword oriented

Here are some organic SEO techniques that any SEO campaign should contain:

-    Website Analysis. This task involves analyzing all the basic things of a website: internal linking architecture, generated code, text vs html, basic SEO rules for pages (titles, description metatags, first paragraphs, anchors, anchor text, file names, image alt property, subheadings, bold and italic text), pages indexed by search engines, titles for the menu pages and so on.

-    Keyword Research. When you think about building fresh content it should always be based on a list of keywords. This list should contain detailed information about the competition, monthly search volume and related long tail keywords.

-    Keyword Relevancy. Every keyword has to be checked for relevancy. For example, if you blog about photography it doesn’t necessary means that the keyword “wedding photography” is relevant to you.

-    Content Development and Planning. Once you have your keyword list you have to know how to use it in content and how to link between articles.

-    Internal Linking. Proper linking guarantees a complete indexing of your website by search engines and you can also push forward some of your content.

-    Competition Analysis. You have to know what your competition is doing, how they are targeting your keywords and why they’re ranking better.

-   Analysis of Google Analytics Reports. Having analytic software is crucial. You have to understand metrics, how to read reports and how to interpret it, how to make decisions based on that.

-   Stay in touch with your market. Using tools like Google Alerts, Google Insight for Search, Google Keyword External Tool, Google Search Based Keywords and Google Trends will help you pick your keywords and stay ahead of your competition by knowing the rising trends.

What would you add?

I would like you to write in comments what do you think about SEO and SEM, what other organic SEO techniques you use or know, what do you think about white hat SEO techniques, what other common mistakes do you know. Share your ideas or ask your questions.

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