SEO Blog

Your keywords play a pivotal role in the successes and failures of any website. If you choose the wrong terms, you could find yourself hopelessly off the radar in terms of search engine rankings, whilst the right ones could be delivering a steady stream of targeted traffic right throughout your site.

The earlier you are able to define your core keywords, the sooner you will be able to begin your optimisation process. Nothing is more frustrating than writing a whole page of copy, plus Meta targeting one set of keywords and then having to rewrite the lot with another. Over time, changes may occur as your SEO campaign develops, but you don’t want to have to change this too early in the game.
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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.
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Long tail SEO keywords, as the name suggests, are made up of a number of words that create a phrase. These phrases will then help you to be optimised for those words, particularly in the particular order in which they are written.

Because these keywords, or phrases, are longer they tend to have a greatly reduced competition rate. But as with all things in SEO, one positive is usually counterweighted by a negative; in this case the downside is that traffic for longer terms is usually significantly reduced. However, it’s not all bad news as I’ll now try to explain.
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SEO revolves around keywords. Every aspect of every technique requires a basic understanding of the fundamental terms that are relevant to your site. If you don’t have these, you can’t optimise effectively, it’s as simple as that.

But keywords aren’t just about describing what you do and what you offer, it goes deeper than that. To define effective keywords, you first need to refine your options. This means that you have to do thorough research to determine what your competition is, what people are searching for and where you can get the most targeted traffic.

It’s important to research thoroughly for a number of reasons, the first of which is that you don’t want to end up wasting your time later on. If you’ve been developing a cutting edge website you need to get it seen, to do this you need to get on to the search engine rankings. All sectors have competition, some more than others of course, but you need to find a way of getting around the fiercest competitors and find those terms that will still get targeted traffic.

This isn’t easy, many website’s work tirelessly to find the terms that would leapfrog them over other competitors and as the web continues to expand, this will increase. Short tail keywords, those that often include one or two words, are often highly sought after in terms of search engine rankings. These are the phrases that appear in search queries more often, therefore offer the best chance for traffic. But due to the generic nature of short terms, they are much sought after and hugely difficult to rank for.

Longer terms though tend to be more specific. These could include locations, adjectives (such as leading…, top…, market leaders…,) or the specification of a product or service. These can be a lot longer and, due to their broader focus, will have considerably less competition. That said, they will also be searched for in far less quantity. This could of course negatively impact your traffic levels but, conversely, could actually increase your conversion rate.

When searching for a longer term, we tend to know pretty much what it is that we’re looking for. Therefore we are in the state of mind of being ready to purchase, rather than simply researching, as you might with the broader short terms.

To define your keywords you first need to understand your business, your objectives and what it is that best sums these up. Don’t get lured in by just going for the most obvious ones, particularly if your site currently doesn’t rank for any terms. What you need to do is start getting noticed for something, anything in fact that is relevant to what you’re doing. Long or short tail, both can help you to get noticed.

With keywords defined you can then  go about implementing them and strengthening your site right across the board; making keywords your first step in SEO.