Posted on January 17th, 2011Long tail keywords are an excellent method of generating traffic to your website. Unfortunately, they are difficult to research. Those searching for shorter keywords will most certainly run across longer terms. As the short tailed phrase improves its search engine ranking, traffic will increase. It is possible to gauge your SEO success on the effect of longer keywords that increase traffic before a shorter term hits the first page of a search engine.
The Google Keyword Tool
In the case of targeting Google visitors, the Google Keyword Tool will help you generate a list of variants pertinent to your primary phrase. Then utilize a Tag Cloud to discover which phrases fit best into your keyword mix. Tag Clouds tend to make recurrent phrases appear larger thus giving you a quick snapshot of the most utilized keywords. There are plenty of Tag Cloud generators available online for free.
The Tag Cloud
Another method of understanding your current traffic is to create a Tag Cloud by exporting your Analytics keywords in groups of 500. You will be surprised at the high frequency of words used to drive visitors to your site. Then make adjustments to those keywords that are the highest frequency or reduce the total number of keywords used. Therefore, you are creating a list of targeted keywords.
Eliminate Low Quality Traffic
Most individuals do not even consider eliminating free traffic. However, these visitors are of lower quality with a high bounce rate. Therefore, this can result in a negative long-term effect on your rankings by diluting your value within the targeted industry. You want highly target visitors that are actually interested in your product of service.
Learn what is working
In either of these approaches, the traffic volume for each phrase is not measured. As an alternative, the objective is to learn which other keywords are appearing in the search engine results as well as among the actual traffic. Even through a quick review of the keywords, you should be able to determine new opportunities for improved optimization and content development.
Each of these methods is a great way to learn the keywords that are working and those that are not. Once this is discovered, you can eliminate those that are not performing well thus driving poor quality traffic to your website. It is always important to optimize your keywords for quality, relevant traffic that will actually be interested in your product or service.