The web is a wonderful communicating device that can be used as a means to distribute data therefore , it is extremely popular with people wanting to promote goods and services online. That being said, the web houses scores of business web sites many of which remain not known to online visitors for the very simple reason that they do not turn up in the various search engine results pages. Fortunately, there’s a thing known as SEO which can assist in increasing the exposure of a website on the net.

Before proceeding further, let us briefly clarify what’s meant by the abbreviation ‘SEO’. It stands for the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ whereby the visibility of a site is increased using so-called ‘natural’ or unpaid search engine rankings. Websites can also be marketed by means of paid methods such as Google AdWords, for instance, which is a pay-per-click marketing method; however this is accomplished in a completely different way to natural search optimisation techniques.

Organic SEO can be performed in a number of ways but it is accomplished mainly by a) making the particular structure of the internet site per se attractive to search engines and b) determining the search terms that web searchers make use of, and using these words to improve the amount of back links to a site. The search words, that are generally referred to in the internet marketing environment as ‘keywords’, can be wide or narrow and are labelled ’short tail’ and ‘long tail’ respectively. Short-tailed search phrases are normally no longer than a couple of words whilst long-tailed search phrases can be as lengthy as 4 or even 5 words.

Short tail keywords are usually targeted first and foremost by search engine optimisers in their SEO campaigns mainly because short tails tend to be a lot more frequently used by internet visitors than long tails tend to be. This is not to say that short tails are superior, though, because they both have benefits.

The main advantage of employing the short keywords in a web marketing strategy is their popularity. Take the words ‘air conditioning’, for example. A lot of people who are looking for anything related to this topic will simply type in these 2 words and nothing more, hence it makes sense that this might be a preferred phrase for the search optimisation expert to target. In SEO terminology, it could be asserted that there is a lot of demand for this search term and therefore plenty of competition surrounding it too. Obviously, the aim is usually to get onto the initial page of search engine results for a heavily used search term such as this but because there are only a few locations on the initial page it may not always be possible because the competition is so high.

This is where the application of long tail keywords comes in. The words ‘air conditioning installation’, while only 3 words long, is made considerably more precise by the inclusion of the word ‘installation’. If you look at the statistics you will see that there are a reasonable quantity of visitors who will use a key phrase similar to this to justify it being employed in an SEO campaign to get an air conditioning related website onto the first results page for that keyword.

As you have seen from the above, there are actually good reasons to use both extended and shorter tail keywords in natural search optimisation campaigns…

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