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The benefits of increasing search engine traffic to any website are many. For online retailers and affiliate marketers, this means a higher potential for greater product sales and referral commissions.

For the average blogger, the increase in search engine traffic means a bigger audience and possibly more long term profit from the display of on-site or privately arranged advertisements.

Understanding how to consistently send more search engine traffic to your website requires an appreciation of the Long Tail theory and subsequently the effective manipulation of traffic-directing long tail keywords.

First coined in by Chris Anderson in a seminal 2004 article in Wired Magazine , the Long Tail is a socio-statistical theory which suggests that the collective sales of products in low demand can exceed that of popular products and bestsellers.

Applying this theory to mass market retailers like Amazon , Anderson suggests that catering to minority tastes and making low-demand products consistently available will allow businesses to achieve higher profit margins, than if they were to solely focus on high-demand/popular products.

Here is the Long Tail in a Nutshell:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

When applied to websites and search engine traffic/marketing, it simply means that most websites are likely to receive most of their search engine visitors through a variety of low-volume search queries instead of a handful of major keywords.

Therefore focusing on developing the keywords which receive lower volumes of search traffic will lead to an increase in the overall amount of visitors from search engines to your website.

What are Long Tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are simply multi-phrase search queries which visitors use on search engines to arrive at your website. These longtail keywords are much more targeted than the general or main keyword topic and they literally embody a visitor’s need for specific information.

Here is an example. ‘Credit Cards‘ is the general keyword topic and long tail keywords within this niche includes terms such as the following:

• credit cards for people with bad credit
• list of low interest credit cards
• benefits of small business credit cards
• good canadian credit cards for students

These long tail keywords are actual search queries, therefore optimizing your site and creating content to match these search queries will allow you to attract visitors who search for information via these and similar search terms.

Benefits of Long Tail keywords

Here are four main reasons why you should consider optimizing your website for long tail keywords:

• Long tail keywords lead to higher conversions. Visitors arriving through multi-phrase search queries might be more likely to make purchases or convert on affiliate programs or recommendations. By targeting these longtail phrases, you are effectively targeting a market of potential buyers.
• Long tail Keywords are Easier to rank. It is much easier to make your website rank well on search engines for longtail keywords because of the generally weaker competition.
• More Visitors to your website. Targeting long tail keywords will gradually lead to more search engine traffic because you’ll have a lot of pages indexed and ranking for specific phrases related to your website/business. This means increased visibility and therefore a much larger amount of search engine traffic.
• Higher monetization potential. Search engine visitors are very valuable because they are targeted individuals who are seeking specific information and hence are more likely to click on contextual ads or subscribe to your site newsletter or blog feed. This grows your audience and allows you greater monetization potential in the long run through product sales or the use of third-party ad networks.

Five Ways to Find and Target Your Long Tail Keywords

Here is a list of five methods you can use to discover the long tail keywords that are relevant to your website and niche. These methods consist of effectively utilizing several online web tools as well as basic content development tactics.

1. Keyword Analytic and Tracking Programs

HitTail and 103bees are two keyword/analytic programs you can use on your website. You’ll just need to drop a few lines of code in your site template and both programs will start to suggest specific long-tail keywords you can use. They can be considered some sort of a lazy and semi-passive way to develop a range of long tail keywords.

I’ve personally tried both analytic packages for several weeks and didn’t find them to be really useful because of several reasons:

• Poor Keyword management interface. If your site receives a lot of search traffic, the analytic programs will give you a lot of suggestions, sometimes far too many for you to implement.

  Filtering and selecting specific keywords from the list presented still requires some degree of time and work, not to mention that the weak interface makes it impossible to group, sort and tag keywords according to specific to-do time frames and priorities.

• No built-in search volume measure for each keyword phrase they suggest. You might want to run the list of long tail keyword suggestions you receive through a search volume analyzer to find out which one to prioritize.

  Links to free keyword tracker programs like Wordtracker and the ability to sort the keywords according to approximate search volumes would have be very useful indeed.

• Weak performance for new sites. If you’ve just started a new website or blog, these packages will not help because if you don’t have any search hits, you won’t get any keyword suggestions.

  It also means that even if you start getting a little search traffic, the keywords suggestion will come rather slowly. This doesn’t allow you to plan and create content in advance to match your search marketing campaigns.

However if you are pressed for time or am unwilling to do research on your own, these analytic packages might come in handy.

If I were to pick one program to use, I would go with 103bees because they offer more statistical features than HitTail while acting as a SERPs tracker which enables you to monitor how your keywords are ranking on the search engines.

HitTail only allows one website per account so if you want an analytics tool for several websites, 103 bees would be better as they allow you integrate and monitor multiple websites within the same interface.

2. Internal On-Site Search Boxes.

Monitor what keyword phrases users are searching for on your website and create pages with these exact keywords and variations of these keyword phrases. This is a passive and useful way of developing long tail keyword rich webpages.

Your visitors are effectively doing all the research for you and their search behavior usually corresponds in some way to the general public’s search habits.

3. Online Keyword Research Tools

In my previous article on how to pick on your blog niche?, I’ve written about how keyword research tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool can help you determine the profitability of a niche.

These tools can also help you to develop a broad range of secondary keywords when you type in a core keyword such as ‘credit cards’. Both of these tools will give you a long list of tools sorted according to their search volume.

For example, here’s a query for the keyword ‘credit cards’ on both Adwords and the SEO Book tool:

These keywords and phrases are components of long tail keywords you should target. What you should do is to keep a list of these keywords in an accessible document and when you write any article, be sure to include at least one of these keywords as your title tag.

This can be done systematically and you should go through the entire list at least once or twice.You should connect these keywords with a variety of phrases which are similar to search queries.

For instance, if I were to use the first few items on the Adwords list above for ‘credit cards’, I would include specific phrases before or after the keywords.

Here are some examples of possible page titles:

• How to pick a credit card
• 4 ways to apply for a credit card
• Bad credit cards to avoid

Another tool you can use is Google Suggest, a search box which guesses what you are typing in it and offers suggestions in real time. This uses data from the overall popularity of searches it sees and can be a useful way to narrow down your searches to specific keyword niches.

Note that these keyword suggestions are not longtails but rather categorical keywords which each contain a whole bunch of long tail keyword phrases. Google suggest should only be used to narrow down your search so you can do further analysis through keyword tools or competitor analysis.

If you are using Firefox as a browser, I highly recommend installing the Customize Google extension because it allows you to have Google Suggest functionality on the usual Google search boxes as well.

4. Competitor Analysis: Finding their Long Tail Keywords

Learning how your competitor gets traffic to their website is a powerful strategy because your competitor has already targeted a whole bunch of long tail keywords. You’ll only need to optimize your site and create new pages which target these keywords as well.

Depending on your overall link profile, on-site optimization and site strength, you will stand a chance of ranking better than your competitor on the search engines.

There are two ways to find your competitors keywords. One is to visit their websites and analyze their webpages, check out their title and meta tags, along with their backlinks if you have the time. The benefit of this detailed research is that you’ll come to understand your competitors a lot better.

A faster method to perform competitor keyword analysis would be to use free online keyword parsing tools like SEODigger, which allows you to immediately find out which keywords your competitor is targeting by simply inputing their site URL.

SEODigger can be inaccurate when it comes to actual keyword ranks but is generally useful as it shows you various keywords which your competitors are ranking for at the moment.

5. Natural Long Tail Keyword Development

This is the simplest way to develop long tail keywords because it doesn’t require much research at all. All you have to do is to make sure that you update your website or blog more frequently by adding new webpages and core keyword-friendly content.

The key emphasis here is frequency. If you’ve just started a new blog, get it indexed by Google first and then and post as frequently as possible to increase your content visibility on the search engines.

A high frequency of blog posts, each with specific variations of your keywords will help you to gradually get more search traffic.

Dosh Dosh’s Long Tail Keyword Development Strategy

To make things easier for you, I’ve broken down the procedure of finding and developing your long tail keywords into a simple five step process. By following this strategy, you should be able to effectively grow the amount of search traffic you receive daily.

1. Enter your core keywords in the Adwords Keyword Suggestion tool. Download the entire list in a text or excel format.
2. Perform competitor analysis manually or through SEO Digger.
3. Compile in one list, all the longtail keywords from both of the above steps.
4. Start to create webpages or blog posts and include at least one keyword + a phrase in the title.
5. Optional: Set up an keyword analytics package to receive keyword suggestions and track existing keyword performance

Final Thoughts

This article on using Long Tail keywords to attract more search traffic is an companion piece to my series, because niche blogs require consistent search traffic for effective growth and monetization.

If you already own several blogs in profitable niches, these tips on long tail keywords will undoubtedly increase the amount of traffic you receive from search engines.

It has worked remarkably well for me and I’m absolutely confident that you’ll see the same improvement in search traffic figures as well.