What are Long Tail Search Terms?

The ultimate goal when search engine optimising a website within a competitive market is to reach position 1 in the rankings for the most relevant popular search term. Whilst nothing is impossible, sometimes this goal may be unachievable with the given resources or may be more realistic as a long term goal. This is where long tail search terms become a useful way to provide a quick return and generate traffic to your website.

Let us take a website that sells football kits as an example. Now the obvious search terms and keywords that we would like to target during the optimisation of the website are “football”, “kits” and, of course, “football kits”. So here we would be targeting really competitive search terms which, unless we manage to rank within the top 10 search engine results, are unlikely to provide any return.

The quickest way around this is to target long tails search terms, so for the above example we may look to include an extra keyword so that we target search terms such as “cheap football kits” or “new football kits”. This is the beginning of the long tail. If the website sells Liverpool kits then we can start to look at terms such as “Liverpool football kit”, “Liverpool home kit”, “Liverpool away shirt” and even “new Liverpool home socks 07/08″. Then you could also target player names like “Steven Gerrard home shirt”.

So as you can see we now have a selection of search terms that we can target and use to help attract possible customers visit the website.

How do you Target Long Tail Search Results?

Sticking with the football kits example, for every kit sold on the website you would look to have an individual page which we could use to target the long tail search terms. A classic online store structure usually consists of something similar to the following format:
Home –>Categories –> Sub-Categories –> Product Pages

Now the home page could target general terms such as “football kits” and “cheap football kits” then the categories may be made up of the individual leagues and would be optimised for a search term such as “English Premiership football kits” or “Scottish Premier League football shirts”, plus at the categories level you may have sections targeting the terms “new football kits” and “football kit sale”. Then your sub-categories are likely to be the teams within each league which is when you target search terms such as “Liverpool football kit” or “Man United football kits”. And finally each product should have its own landing page targeted for related search terms, so for example “Liverpool home shirt 07/08″ or “Tottenham Hotspur 125 years home shirt”. These terms are now really long tail and really targeted.

What are the Benefits of Optimising for Long Tail?

Even though these long tail search terms may individually bring you little traffic, collectively they can provide a surge of new visitors who otherwise may never have found your website.

Taking the online store model above, lets say you have (obviously) 1 home page, 10 category pages, 20 sub-category pages within each category and then 100 product pages within each sub-category. That gives you 20,211 web pages which you can use to target individual long tail search terms. If each of those pages could bring you 1 visitor per day then you are quids in!

Long tail search terms tend to be a lot less competitive so it is easier to quickly find your website ranking within the money positions in search engines.

Long tails search terms also have the advantage of bringing customers to your website who already have a good idea of what it is they want to buy. For example, if someone typed in a search for “football kits” then they are more likely to be in a browsing mindset, not quite sure what they are looking for and possibly even looking for something your website does not offer like say American football kits. But if they type in the exact name of the product and land on your website’s page which is targeted specifically towards it, then the chance is that they are ready to buy and are just shopping around for the best price. If that’s your website then you have a sale.

Summary

Optimising your website just for a few competitive search terms can be a risky business. If it works it can reap rewards but very quickly you can find your website has dropped in rankings and is no longer receiving the traffic. You should support these competitive search terms with long tail search terms to help increase the availability of your website within search engine results. By doing this you may soon find that the majority of your visitors are finding your website through the long tail search terms.

Ps. Hopefully you found this blog post by visiting Google and typing in something like “long tail search engine optimising”

1) Validation of HTML

When creating an accessible website it is essential that you use valid HTML to allow all web browsing software the best chance to correctly read and display/output your website pages.

The SEO advantage of this is that the same rules apply to search engine robots that visit and spider your website as part of the process of adding your site to their listings. If the robot is unable to correctly read the HTML then this may result in it hitting a dead end and will prevent it from listing the full web page correctly and may also prevent further pages within your website from being found by the search engine.

2) Correct Structuring of HTML

As with all programming and markup languages, there are correct and incorrect ways to structure a document. For optimal output, HTML provides tags that each have their own purpose. Some examples are: <title>, <h1>, <h2>, <strong>, <em> alt=, title=. For accessibility these tags should completed and used correctly to help provide users with easy to read structured information.

Search engines uses these tags to help weigh how relevant your web page is for certain search terms. So by correctly including your targeted search terms within these tags you can help your web page rank for these specific terms better than they would without using the tags.

3) Descriptive Titles and Links

To help users quickly determine the subject of a web page it is important to include relevant terms within the title of the page. It is also necessary to include relevant link descriptions for screen readers. So rather than having a link that would read “Click Here” you would use a descriptive link such as “Blue Widgets”.

To tell a search engines the subject of each of your web pages it is important to include relevant search terms within in the individual page titles. By using descriptive search terms in links you help pass relevancy to the targeted page for that search term and this also helps describe to search engine what each linked web page is about. This becomes even more important when you ask other websites to link to your website as this will count as a “vote” within the search engines for your website for the search term within the anchor text.

4) Lowers Bounce Rates

The purpose of accessibility is to allow as many users as possible to correctly view and use your website without hitting barriers that prevent them from accessing information. This includes people with disabilities or temporary injuries (eg. a broken arm) and can also help people with lower spec computers or poor Internet connections.

Whether the purpose of your website is to provide a service, sell products or simply offer a source of information, then the more users who are able to use your website without hitting barriers the more chance the website will have of being successful. If users have a positive experience they will stay and use your website for longer, this can also increase the traffic to your site through word of mouth referrals.

5) Reduces Code to Content Ratio

In the early days of creating websites using HTML, tables tended to be used to structure a web page design. This causes problems for accessibility mainly due to certain screen readers outputting the information in a linear fashion rather than column by column.

Tabled structured web page designs tend to be bulky and require a lot more HTML coding than is necessary. Through using CSS to correctly style you web page design you can reduce the total HTML code whilst also keeping the exact look and feel that you want. This prevents the actual content of your website from being diluted by code and will help search engine more efficiently detect what search terms you web page is relevant to. Another advantage is that with less code the page will load quicker in a web browser making your website a better experience for users.

Position Gold Ltd. has launched their new search engine friendly website. The developments include:

• A design facelift making pages more appealing and easier to read
• New navigation structure grouping sections of the website into top level categories such as ‘Our Services’
• A new search option which will allow you to perform a keyword search and find results throughout our website
• Breadcrumb navigation making it easy to return to previous sections of the website
• New fresh content within the News Articles and SEO Blog sections of the website which will be constantly updated with relevant posts
• RSS feeds of all news and blog items
• User accounts which will allow you to register, log-in and contribute to posts within the news and blog sections
• Easy bookmarking option that allows you to save pages within your own social bookmarking accounts
• Highlighted call-to-action points which provide you with quick and easy access to our contact details
• Designed to accessible standards including valid XHTML and CSS

So why the change? Well our focus is always on providing the best service for our clients and sometimes our own website takes a back seat and falls behind the competition. But we also believe there is no better way to showcase our skills than by creating and promoting our own website and have acted upon this. With the development of this new website you should also start to notice improvements in our natural search engine rankings for targeted search terms within our industry.

Our long term aim with this website is to provide visitors with a useful resource that not only offers a point of contact with Position Gold Ltd. and highlights our services but will also bring you useful news articles and blog posts that are targeted towards the SEO community.