We know the specifics when it comes to effectively securing your website against any of Google’s updates. Now we can go in to more detail about effective and under used strategies like long tail SEO which is also considered to be white hat.

The term long tail refers to the use of less popular search terms on a collective basis to out-perform singular more searched terms and phrases. Amazon.com is one of the best examples of long tail SEO; they leverage it in a way which is easy to understand. Instead of focusing on one or two postings which generates thousands of sales they focus on numerous postings of relative items which incur fewer sales each but total more. If you just getting into SEO no matter what type of website you have this can be an easy way to start getting more traffic quickly.

So How Does This Relate to SEO?
The long tail concept applies to search keywords as well, a standard website may get tons of visitors every month spread across hundreds or thousands of search terms and it gets even better, in each of the long tailed phrases, terms, or keywords, is a full list of popular keywords as well to increase search engine traffic if you correctly target them.

Reasons That Long Tailed Keywords Outshine Other Keyword Tools Because –
1st – You have the data – Competitors can’t find out your long tailed keywords.
2nd – You already see the potential to rank for these keywords. It’s not practical however to target every long tailed keyword for every site. Many of the larger sites may have thousands of keywords which they receive meniscal amount of traffic for. The secret lies in filtering down your keywords to eliminate the ones with little to no traffic and keep only the optimal to increase traffic to those.
Manual Filtering
The first of the pair is to manually type in each of the desired keywords from your previous analytics into Google’s Keyword Tool and then look at their search volume. There are issues which may arise with this method however, mainly being that the time needed to complete the task can be considerable and has to be done on a consistent basis of at least once a month but optimally once a week.

The other problems that could occur with this method are that Google’s Keyword tool is unfortunately very unreliable when it comes to terms with search volumes beneath 400 searches a month. A term could show up as having no searches when it does get 50-100 per month. Or it could show 150 searches per month when it is actually 5 or less.

I personally have leveraged long tail keyword techniques exclusively since I moved my office from Los Angeles to Las Vegas – getting good rankings for very competitive keywords would take too long… and I don’t like to wait for traffic which means new business.