SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Ignore the Tail at Your Peril! from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

The long tail can be applied to both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management alike.

I have seen many clients and SEO/PPC agencies alike who target the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle” (see the video for an explanation), even sometimes just the “fat head” – but they do not consider or even recognize the long tail.

As Rand explains, up to 75% of all traffic can come from the long tail. Therefore if you are only targeting the “fat head” and/or “chunky middle”, you are missing out on most of the traffic that could be coming to your website, and the most relevant traffic at that!

Yahoo have lost 15%, MSN have lost 21% and Ask has also lost 21% over last year.

Searchers are also now using longer search queries when searching for what they want on the web. What does this mean? This means that the average searcher now knows (better) how to use a search engine to find the results that he/she is searching for.

Longer search queries are becoming more popular as year over year increases (and decreases) show just that.

• 1 word search queries have dropped by 3%
• 2 word search queries have dropped by 5%
• 3 word search queries have remained stable
• 4 word search queries have increased by 2%
• 5 word search queries have increased by 6%
• 6 word search queries have increased by 8%
• 7 word search queries have increased by 12%
• 8 word search queries have increased by 22%

This means that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management have become a lot more difficult as search queries become longer and therefore more varied.

Paid advertising using keyword targeting will become more difficult as accounts become larger due to increased keyword numbers. As keyword phrases become more targeted, so too must paid advertising campaigns such as Google AdWords, in order to maximise quality score, reduce Cost Per Click (CPC), and thereby increase Return On Investment (ROI).

Mark looks at some important aspects that will determine if you have any chance to make an impact on the web with your current or proposed web site. Key areas which Mark takes a look at are:

• Help People Find Your Web Site
• Make Sure Your Home Page Resolves Correctly
• Create Quality Content — and Lots of It

Of course, remember that every website is reletive to its competitors. If your competitors are ranking high in search engines and offer the same or similar website content, services, products or layout to yours, then there is probably no reason why you, too should not be able to rank high.

Nonetheless these three steps are indeed important to SEO, even though they have been used and abused in the past. In today’s post I will focus on the third part of the three parts listed below, the META Keywords Tag. Please note that the three “Tags” discussed below appear within the coding of the website, specifically in the head section.

1. Title Tag
2. META Description Tag
3. META Keyword Tag

The META Keywords Tag is a lot less relevant than what it used to be in the past. This is due to abuse of the tag in terms of keyword spamming where hundreds of keywords were inserted into this field to trick search engines into thinking that these keywords, often irrelevant to the website, were in fact important.

The META Keywords Tag used to be primarily used so that a search engine could come along, read the keywords  and keyword phrases that were inserted into this tag and index the website page in accordance with the keywords that appeared within this tag.

As mentioned, due to spamming techniques used to rank websites highly by abusing this tag, the META Keywords Tag is quite irrelevant in the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo. 

Should you still decide to use this tag, especially for the benefit of smaller search engines which may still take notice of it, you should be careful to only insert keywords and keyword phrases which actually appear withing the visible content area of your website page.

Should you include keywords or keyword phrases which do not appear within the content of your site, the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo may actually penalise you for attempting to trick them into ranking your website highly for a term that does not exist on your page. This is the reason why many people no longer include the META Keywords Tag in their code, in order to avoid a possible penalty. But when used correctly, one can still benefit from increased visibility in minor and perhaps even more relevant (to your industry) search engines .

It may be very well and good to have plenty of informative content on your website but if your website pages do not include the correct keywords, that which potential visitors are typing into search engines, then what are the chances that search engines will rank you highly for keyword phrases that generate a load of traffic? The answer is zilch, zero, nichts. Visit our article “What are Keywords All About” to learn more about keyword selection.

To target the correct keyword phrases we need to collect an extensive amount of data to find out several things.

The most important is keywords or keyword phrases which generate a high amount of traffic. For these are the most valuable keywords to your website that will bring in the most traffic.

As well as this however, we need to be sure that of those keywords and keyword phrases with high traffic, that we select keywords which are more likely to convert into customers. It may be well and good to have thousands of visitors flowing through your site, but if they are not converting into paying customers, then there is little point.

The third step is to filter these keywords to select those which can be inserted into your website best in order to keep the content flowing and natural to read. The last thing we want is to create content that does not make sense to your visitors due to over-optimization of website content.

Since there are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords and keyword phrases that visitors are typing into search engines, this can often be a very tedious process which demands much concentration and effort.

After we have found the best keywords and keyword phrases for your site we need to look at keyword insertion and keyword density. Keyword density is an extremely important step, as the incorrect keyword density may result in a spam filter being flagged on your site from search engines, meaning that you may actually decrease your website ranking rather than increase it. Find out more about keyword density in our previous article “Is Keyword Density Important?“.

Another important step is to analyze your competitors. We will look at whether or not they have employed content optimization (or search engine optimization) and analyze which keywords they are targeting. We will compare their content amount to yours and see where you can improve over their shortcomings. After all they may be ranked above you in search engines – we want it the other way around.

Hopefully, from this article, you have learned the importance of content optimization and some of the steps which take place to get the best results. There is a great amount of work that needs to go into content optimization if you aim to do it correctly and find those keywords to target that less of your competitors are targeting and which result in just as much or higher visitor numbers and a higher conversion rate to give you a higher Return On Investment.

Therefore the main focus of Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing is on keyword phrases. Keyword phrases consist of numerous keywords stringed together. Usually when we type our search query into, say, Google, we will start off with something basic like ‘books’. If that keyword is too broad we may refine it by adding another keyword, ‘books hong kong’. Further we could add to that ‘dean koontz books hong kong’. In fact, the number of keywords strung together could be infinite, but usually we will look at a maximum of about 5 keywords in a keyword phrase as users are less likely to use more than that.

When it comes to optimizing ones website, or managing a Pay Per Click account such as Google AdWords, these keyword phrases come into play.

With Search Engine Optimization it is highly important to have these keyword phrases visible throughout your site. This may mean:

• Keywords in your domain name eg. www.hiking-hong-kong.com
• Keywords in your Title and Meta tags (coding tags used to describe the content within your website)
• Keywords in your website content
• Keywords in your image description tags
• Keywords in the links that point to your page from other websites eg. Hong Kong Hiking Trails

The more relevant your website looks to a search engine in terms of the keyword phrase a user searches for, the more likely that your website will be listed higher in the search engine results.

However it is not as simple as just adding keywords wherever you can at a whim. Careful placement has to take place to ensure that there are not too many keywords used on a website. In the past, spammers or Black Hat SEOs used to take advantage of search engines by inserting hundreds of keywords into a page to trick the search engines into ranking their websites above the rest. These days, as a result, search engines are much more diligent.

Consequently, Keyword Density plays a big role alongside the use of keyword phrases to make sure that there are not too many incidences of a keyword in any particular area, which, if too many exist, may result in a penalty consisting of a drop in rankings on a search engine rather than that which was sought, a rise in rankings. Search Engines are very strict now, as they want to provide the best user experience by providing the best search results. 

Similarly, Keyword Phrases play the most important role in Pay Per Click marketing. Search Engines use Pay Per Click engines such as Google’s AdWords to list sponsored links on their search results as well as on content sites. These sponsored links (ads) are triggered to appear when a user types in a keywords phrase in a search engine that matches the keyword phrase bid upon by the advertiser. This also works with content placement ads (ads that appear within the content of other websites) in that a site about ‘dean koontz books’ will trigger your ad selling ‘dean koontz books’ if the content on that site mentions Dean Koontz and if you have also bid upon that keyword phrase.

With Google AdWords, for example, different factors play a role in optimization such as:

• Campaigns focused on certain demographics (in relation to where your product/service is and which languages you provide it in)
• Ad Groups focused on different keyword groups eg. Dean Koontz, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle
• Keyword phrases related to these specific Ad Groups
• Exact Match, Phrase Match, Broad Match or Negative Match keyword phrases (different ways to bid on a keyword phrase depending on the variations of what a user may actually type into a search engine)
• Ad Text and the use of keyword phrases used therein
• Keyword Phrases used on your website (where your ad points to) in relation to the keyword phrases you are bidding on

In both cases, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing, Keywords or Keyword Phrases to be more precise, play one of the most important roles. Therefore it is paramount that you get this right when either establishing a Search Engine Optimization campaign or in targeting the correct clients in a Pay Per Click engine. Because if the keywords you target are incorrect, then your entire campaign will be worthless and your Return On Investment (ROI) will be nothing as you will be targeting the wrong group of people.