Short answer: Yes

You can also target related terms... and continuing with your example above you might also wish to optimise the same page for terms such as:
Hair Growth
Hair Gain
Hair Growth ideas
Hair Gain ideas
etc

Yep, worked for me It's kinda the same thing with long tail keywords. You know?... like when you try to rank for hair growth and you rank for hair growth tips. I think it goes both ways: longer keywords and shorter keywords, included in your actual targeted keywords.

Thank you both.

I guess my next question, then, is how would I rank for both? Or what is the best way to rank for both? Like use them both as anchor links back to my site? Or would using the longer anchor link suffice? Thanks again

I think you should target the larger one. The shortest one is included as well.

Use the anchor text for the long tail. As your ranking improves for the long tail, your ranking would be also be increasing for the shorter keyword. When you reach where you want to be for the long tail, you start building link to the shorter keyword.

I agree with the others and want to add a bit about targeting semantic keywords. In your case, the seed keyword is How to Grow Hair and you will want plenty of content targeting that phrase, along with related phrases.

You will also want to put up some content on hair care, shampoo, brushes, etc... because they are all considered to be semantic keywords (in G's eyes) and by following the long trail strategy of targeting words with fewer than just a few hundred searches, you will be able to get even more traffic, while looking all the more natural to G.

Yes it's true you can rank your keyword rich domain name, but any extra words or characters mean that you have to work much harder to rank it, a lot more backlinks etc than would otherwise be required.

Sometimes it's better to try for a different exact match domain name, it pays dividends in the short term and long term

I am not sure but it helps in this below case:
If you have done off page promotions for "How to grow hair fast" keyword, it will help when you are start promotions for "How to grow hair" keywords. But without off page promotions for "How to grow hair" it didn't get top position with the help of "How to grow hair fast"

Ok, that all makes sense to me. Just to double check though, you all agree that by I should target the longer phrase first, and after that starts getting some juice to it and driving traffic, then go after the shorter phrase.

Hi,

of course.. the answer is yes since Google and search engines works through the proximity (how exact is a given keyword in relation to the search term that a user enter in google´s search box).. so if your keyword includes the words conforming the original keyword you has showed up in the example.. you will be able to target both keywords..

Cheers to all

so, it makes more sense to target two keyword phrases at once then right? Like why would someone not?

thank you guys for the responses! Definitely helping out. Anyone else have any opinions?

Its best technique to get good ranking
first of all you need to target low volume keyword and when you ranked with low volume keyword then you should go for medium and after high volume keyword.
First of all you need to target: How to grow hair fast
then How to grow hair
then Grow hair

so you all think that it is a better strategy to target a ton of long tail keywords that are easy to rank for instead of a medium difficult one?

and by doing that they also kind of target the shorter phrases at the same time?

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sounds good to me.

yes and if you use natural writing and add related keywords in your text you will be shown for many variations of your original keywords. This increases over time.

yes you will increase ranking for all keyword matching to this

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i have decided to go with longer keyword phrases for now and then work on the shorter ones later. Now I cannot decide how many long tail keyword phrases I should target. should I do just a couple and focus on backlinks, or do a lot and then backlinks? Thanks again.

I suggest you use quotation marks to find out the real competition. If it is below 100,000 searches you could be on to a winner.
There are several keyword tools out there I use the adwords tool myself because I am miserable lol nah I just got into internet marketing myself and have done lots of research through watching guides an reading articles.
The number of keywords they used was about 4-5 and remember to use these in the headings, titles, url and your content.
One more suggestion for you JDAX23 google up the cash clone system its totally free it really helped me and got me going.

You will be targetting both phrases, the long and the short, but you will be targetting the longer phrase more as it is an exact match in the domain

I have another question regarding keywords.
Ok so I have my blog up and running doing well with 2 specific keywords I have 6 keywords that I chose but I currently do not optimise for all of these yet. As I said 2 main words which I am really focusing on I am already on page 2 of google with my main one after 2 weeks .
My question is can I choose to change some of these other keywords I have not be targeting without being punished by google?
I am always on google adwords looking for "hidden gems" I stumbled on a few which I think could be better traffic wise and optimising my site. Any answers would be appreciated. Thank you.

You should target the long tail keyword..that will show you some quick results..