If search engine marketing and optimization is important and fast results are a requirement, long tail keywords are a critical element to driving increased traffic to your website. What are long term keywords? They are very focus keywords or phrases that are highly targeted to your target market or product and service offering. The downside is these phrases is that while being very targeted, the also offer lower overall visitor traffic. This inherent negative is quickly replaced by the extremely focused website visitors that do find your site.

I will use my husband to illustrate this example. He is an avid deer hunter. If you target “deer hunting” as your keyword phrase, you might eventually get my husband to your website. You will have to fight for his attention because this phrase is both general and very generic. Now say you are a small business owner that offers guided whitetail deer hunts in Kansas. My husband would search on just that phrase if he wanted to find a guided deer hunt in Kansas. What phrase you ask? The one that just described your business. If the guide set up a website page that focused on the discussion of “guided hunts in Kansas” and mentions “whitetail deer”, my husband will quickly find his way to the website.Does this matter? Yes. He may search the Internet randomly for guided hunts. When he gets focused on actually taking one, he will quickly start to narrow his search to more specifics keywords and phrases. If you catch him in his pursuit for an adventure, you will convert him from wondering website traffic to an actual sale. He utlizes the Internet to search for hunts for years and will continue to do so. One of his biggest complaints, knowing I am his wife, is that many guides do not understand search engine optimization and have no idea what the ancronym SEO means. According to my husband, these guides would be “so much easier to find” and his website searches would take much less time. Should they know about SEO and internet marketing? No and I do not need to know anything about running a small business that performs hunting guides. That being said, if the guide does want to obtain new clients through the Internet, the website does need to be optimized properly and a Internet marketing consultant can help.

The important point to make is that you do not base your entire search engine optimization efforts on long tail search terms or phrases. You need to think about what your visitors will search for when seeking your product or service offering and the create a balance between both generic terms and highly focused terms.