Keywords are words in the content of your website that are relevant to what prospects would be searching for in Google and Bing queries – leading them to your site. Long tailed keywords are three and four word keyword phrases which are very specific to whatever product or service you’re selling. I prefer to call them keywords, then keyword phrases, and finally - extended keyword phrases.

Why are long tailed keywords or extended keyword phrases important?
When prospects use extended keyword phrases in search queries, they tend to know exactly what they’re looking for, which makes it so much more likely that they’ll buy whatever you’re selling once they find your site.

An example – if your business sells exclusive hair products not found in the major chain stores, search queries for shampoo would lead prospects to millions of results – but probably none of them yours. The search query is simply too general. And the catch here is that if that prospect is searching for shampoo, they’re probably not a good prospect for your product anyway. Using shampoo as a keyword in Google AdWords will probably cost you a ton in advertising dollars, with little return on your investment.

But if you sell Brocato hair products, a search query for Brocato Volumizing Tonic will rank much higher in the search engines, improving your visibility to the world – and in turn, increase your sales.

Taking extended keyword phrases one step further
To capture discriminating shoppers, you should be creating pages based on extended keyword phrases. If you’re a Salon, Car Repair Shop or Web Hosting Provider, there are hundreds of variations of extended keyword phrases that you could use to create unique pages. Each of these pages should have its own title, description meta tag, H1 header tag and content that emphasizes your product or service.

A word of caution
Don’t go overboard on extended keyword phrases or you may SPECIFIC yourself out of business. Of course, if you have 500 visitors to your site looking for shampoo versus 100 visitors searching for Brocato products, which would you prefer? Site analytics have to be matched to conversion ratios.

How do you know what extended keyword phrases to focus on?
The key here, really, is how to determine which extended keyword phrases have sufficient traffic for you to target. Research is paramount. Fortunately, there are tons of programs available. A recent search on Bing for Keyword Analysis Tools returned over 34 million results!

excellent post/good read, thanks.

one very important tool is http://google.com/trends

Any idea what their traffic threshold is on Google Trends?

I tried to find a definite number but can't seem to find it..

But it must be relatively high because a lot of my searches yield no results.

So in retrospect, it isn't such a good tool for extended keyword phrases which tend to have less traffic.

The long tailed keywords are really excellent and they would do very well from conversion aspects as well. Just sticking to one or two word terms might be like a mistake because even people who are interested in buying web services and products would look for some long tailed terms which are more descriptive.

Great article. When it comes to promoting products/business using Adwords, I agree with you about using specific keywords for cost as well as conversion rate reasons. What about SEO. Is it also better to optimize your website for long tailed keywords?

My take? Absolutely.

Hi - Nice information! Hope this would help many more as it has to me!

Anyone heard about google caffeine?

For those that haven't, here's a link discussing it.

Yet another great post from Steve. Good job! I have to agree on the long tailed keywords here, they are the mecca of making money.