Longtail Keywords - What You Can and Can't Take On

[jacobjoseph]

I think this must be my 100th post on the subject of what you can and cannot out rank easily but as I have now started to concentrate more and more on getting longtail key traffic the question just has to be asked.

For longtail keywords with less than 1000 exact searches per month literally all the results are pages from authority sites and more often than not they do not have the keyword in the title, description or H1 tag. They also have very few backlinks to these pages.

How difficult are these to outrank? I am looking to rank around 200 pages of content in the next month or two and need to know how is best to proceed.

Another dilemma I am having in is what is the situation when the site in top position has 400+ backlinks but does not appear to be targeting the keyword.

Basically, does the big G prefer pages that are on page optimized for these keywords or do they prefer to give these positions to authority sites knowing that their page is going to be vaguely relevant.

I have read a few articles on the subject and like with everything in IM it is contradicted over and over by other "experts" and I have no idea who to trust.

I appreciate any response.

P.S Although this seems like a newb question I am a full time IM'er so feel free to be as techy with your replies as you like...

[t3ch]

In my experiences keywords in the title, description, url and content be the first factor that the G consider in their ranking, then the anchor text link (keyword use as backlink). But it could be different from other warriors experience. What i usually do is if i found keyword with top 10 ranking sites having many backlink with poor on page SEO, i would check it with SerpAttck to check what anchor text link use in the backlink. If many of the backlink use the keyword as anchor link, then i would check more detail about all the competition for the keyword.

[jacobjoseph]

Okay so you believe that the anchor text is the important part? I am inclined to agree.

I just do not like the idea of targeting a keyword with say 480 searches a month trying to knock ehow or someone like that off the top.

The thing is nobody optimizes for these keywords because they are trying to pick up visitors searching for words within the keywords (with much higher numbers)

Looks like I am going to have to go for the trial an error approach unless someone else tells me otherwise

[bigcat1967]

I just do not like the idea of targeting a keyword with say 480 searches a month trying to knock ehow or someone like that off the top.

Hey Jacob:

I'm not sure if this is the answer you are looking for - and I know that you want to get your own website ranked...but here is what I'm doing as of lately.

I am using the likes of ehow and hubpages to get ranked on the first page. I then have a link going to my own website.

Also, I try to dominate my niche. I'm slowly working on one where I am ranked at #5 and #7 using Hubpages and Articlebase. I'm trying to rank Infobarrel as well as EZA in this nich. If I do - I have four out of the top ten spots and all the articles have links going back to my website.

I pretty much go after dominating niches that maybe long tailed as well. The one I'm focused on is a three word phrase and it looks like I'm getting decent traffic.

[SEO ibiza]

Originally Posted by jacobjoseph

Looks like I am going to have to go for the trial an error approach unless someone else tells me otherwise

this is always the best thing to do anyway.

a better idea of how tough the searches are is the allintitle:keyword keyword search, volume doesn't really tell you very much, and if the volume figure is sourced from the Google Adwords tool that's way off before you start anyway.

try one, see how difficult it is, and more importantly see how much actual traffic you get, it's highly likely it will be nothing like the Google tool tells you it should be.

[wsotoolz]

Another option in addition to allintitle that you can use to dig even deeper is to search the keyword in quotes in G and go to the last page of results. On the last page you will see this:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 729 already displayed.

This number can be used as another metric to judge competition and how easy it will be to rank on page 1. 729 would be pretty difficult. Under 300 should be pretty easy with a little back linking. I think the allintitle number actually is inflated with page results from the same domain that G is actually excluding in the long run from searches.

This is something I am testing out lately and I can't say for sure it is 100% but it is something to keep your eye on. I always recommend you also review the top 10 sites for PR, backlinks and etc as well.