SEO Blog

We all have ambitions to get to the top of Google for the short terms that are searched for most. But in reality these are often highly competitive phrases that will take a concerted effort over a long period of time to get anywhere near the summit.

As Internet marketers are always at pains to clarify, SEO is very much a long-term solution and should certainly not be seen as a quick fix for your traffic woes. With this in mind, short tail phrases ought to be a part of your wider strategy; but if you are to get yourself noticed on the search engines in the reasonably near future, you might want to consider long tail phrases.

As a rule, the longer your keyword phrase is, the less competition you will encounter. Of course there are exceptions to this, but to start gaining rankings you’ll need to start with a few terms that don’t have quite the same level of rivalry. This will require a little research and you may have to employ a bit of creative thinking to work out what exactly will fit in with your site and still encourage a good stream of traffic.

When it comes to long tail keywords, there are actually a couple of benefits. Firstly you will encourage search engines to rank you for that elongated phrase. This will of course give you an opportunity to get a decent position due to the lower competition. However, if your long tail phrase also contains your short tail keywords, you can also help optimise for these too.

Confused? Well imagine your primary keyword is ‘designer handbags’. That is likely to have a high rate of competitiveness amongst other sites and so could be difficult to get a decent ranking on Google. To bi-pass this you might want to use a number of long-tail phrases, with this main term embedded within them – for example ‘Cheap Designer Handbags’, ‘Bargain Gucci Designer Handbags’, ‘Buy Designer Handbags Online’ etc.

It will take a little more time, but ultimately the effort should be rewarded with a slow building of traffic for some highly targeted phrases. After all, whether they are long or short tail, the keywords that you use will ultimately be highly relevant to what the individual pages of your site offer; therefore, however you rank and for whatever term, you should see the benefit in a reasonably short period of time.