Long tail keywords

If you had your choice of visitor traffic originating from the search engines, which scenario would your choose?

• One thousand visitors from one keyword?
  
  or
• One thousands visitors from one thousand keywords?
   

If you can't easily decide, you are not alone. The SEO community seems to be split on this issues as well. It's hard to decide, given the fact that targeting a few very popular keywords could bring to your site thousands of visitors a day, but at the same time you would be facing some very stiff competition. The more popular a keyword phrase is, the more optimization and link building effort is needed to achieve top ranking. So there is a trade off between choosing less competitive phrases with lower traffic vs. more popular keywords with higher difficulty levels to attain top ranking.

Some SEOs prefer to target a few very popular keywords to get the greatest bulk of their traffic while others prefer to focus on many low competition keywords for an almost guaranteed top ranking. Also most SEOs recommend webmasters new to search engine optimization to target Long Tail keywords because it's easier to rank well in a short period of time.

So lets examine first what the Long Tail keyword phrases are all about and how they can drive targeted visitors to your site. Webmasters with a single focus on a dozen popular keywords may miss a very big chuck of traffic from obscure low competition phrases. The Long Tail keywords may be only searched a few times a month, but given a few hundred of these keywords, they can deliver a decent amount of highly targeted traffic. The main advantage of Long Tail keywords is that it's very easy to attain high ranking for them. When you are just starting out it can be a great confidence booster to see the first few visitors trickle in from the search engines using Long Tail keywords.

The Long Tail phrases have a very tight focus, which makes them more targeted than highly popular broad keyword phrases and usually convert better. For example the keyword "golf shoes" might bring in thousands of visitors a day to a website specializing in golf shoes, but if someone searching for a specific brand and model like "men's air accel classic golf shoes" there is a higher chance of sale resulting from the search.