Keywords, SEO, Backlinking, Google Ranking - All That Stuff

Head keywords remain irresistible to many SEOs and website owners. They want to see their site top of Google’s results pages for them. They become trophy keywords.

Plus, few people want to go through the learning curve required to start thinking about groups of keywords (keyword niches).

But as well as ignoring most searches, head keywords are very competitive. Increasingly, despite Google’s fight against paid links, to get top of Google for the big money keywords you need to pay for your site’s inbound link power. Which we don’t want to do, so…

So let’s learn how to play with the long tail…
How to make a profit in the long tail

How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy, you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how…

Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for. I love 2,000 word articles. ..

…This long tail tactic is so effective that you can get great results from a page without getting anything from its primary target keyword. E.g. the page mentioned above doesn’t get a top 10 ranking for either swot analysis or strengths and weaknesses. I summarize this tactic as …

Target the head and exploit the tail

This does not mean that you should spend hours stuffing (or just adding) relevant keywords to your pages. That spoils your copy and usually takes too long to be profitable. It means that you:

Plan the structure of your site’s content, organizing it into categories, e.g. sports cars and family cars for a car site.

Allocate (e.g.‘tag’) existing content to relevant categories.

Each category has a category home page, e.g. a sports car page, that lists links to relevant pages on your site.

For each category, find target keywords (of course I really mean keyword niches). E.g. italian sports cars, sports car insurance.

If a keyword niche is big then make it a category. E.g. italian sports cars might become a category. Planning a site’s structure can be a big job.

For each target keyword, commission or write a long article with lots of words.

Don’t sweat on the individual keywords within your articles. Leaving that copy natural will target 1000s (sometimes 10s of thousands) of keywords. The big job is the initial keyword research and subsequent site planning.

Analyze results. Which keyword niches bring the most response? Continue your keyword research – looking for more keyword niches to target.