Going Long (getting to the top of Google...fast)

I see this mistake over and over. Worse, this one mistake, in today's highly competitive SEO environment, will cause your business to take A LOOOOONG TIME to become profitable.

The mistake I'm referring to is picking keywords that are too general when trying to optimize your site for the search engines.

As an example, let's say you sell dog training videos. Most web owners would say that they want to rank for the following: Dogs, dog, and dog training.

To this I like to say: How much money do you have?

While it is true that the keywords dog and dogs do have a WHOLE LOT of searches, actually ranking for those will take quite a bit of time … and a lot of money.

Not only that, but ranking for those keywords probably won't even make you much money!

So I think it is important to talk a little about what I call "search psychology".

Most people, when they are simply looking for information, will type in very broad search terms (e.g. dog or dog training). When they are getting ready to buy, their search terms become MUCH more specific (e.g. Golden Lab potty training, or Great Dane obedience training).

My point here is that if you actually want to sell things, you want to rank well for the longer (and less used) search phrases that your REAL customers will be using. The benefit to this is that ranking for those longer search phrases is easier and can happen significantly faster than ranking for some short phrase that half the planet is competing for.

Further, and this is an "Ian Falcone exclusive", I've got a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that ranking well for lots of very long search phrases makes it much more likely that other pages on your site will rank well on Google for shorter related phrases, even if you have fewer inbound links than you competitors!

So the question then becomes, "how do you rank for the longer search terms?"

You start by doing some obvious things. First, you create a page narrowly targeted to that ONE key phrase; such as "German Shepherd Guard Dog Training."

You would have the title tag for that page say only that phrase, you would have an H1 tag at the top of your page with that phrase, you would have some real content on your page talking about the training of german shepherd guard dogs, and that page should be findable AT LEAST through your site map, if not also through your site's navigation.

Now what you do is you create an article or two about the training of german shepherd guard dogs … perhaps "How to train your german shepherd to be a guard dog, without getting sued".

Now, you post that article (two is better, three of the better still) to some of the major article directories, making sure that your article has a resource box (at the end of the article) that links to your site.

Finally, you post to a few forums and blogs. Many times these links are coded with "no follow", but what it does is it gets people to start looking at your site from a wide variety of sources. It makes your search listings much more likely to be clicked on because now surfers are seeing your site all over the place. You are setting up an environment where you've got page so narrowly targeted to the search terms your customers are using, that a visitor becomes very likely to convert to a customer because your page is all about EXACTLY what they are searching for.

Now, let's add in to all of this the fact that the long search terms have almost no pages narrowly targeted for them. Inbound links to the preciously few pages that are narrowly targeted are almost non-existent.

By doing what I've said, you'll not only be creating a page specific to each narrow search phrase relevant to your products, your articles will be giving you inbound links thanks to your postings to the article directories.

Add in even just a few other linking strategies and you can be number 1 in a matter of a couple of months.

It just requires a little brainstorming on long search phrases … or simply using the overture search term suggestion tool (found at: http://inventory.overture.com).

There is one thing you need to know about the overture search term tool … it leaves stuff out unless you know to really dig into it. That is why it is often better to BEGIN by brainstorming possible long phrases and then go about the task of finding more of them using the tool.

Here is another "Ian Falcone exclusive."

With my own sites, some of my best business has come from search phrases that the overture tool had NO RESULTS FOR.

As an example, overture has no results for "golden lab training videos". However, if I sold dog training videos I would certainly have a page on my site that specific … not to mention articles spread all over the internet on the subject of training that specific breed.

Remember, overture's information comes from Yahoo!. While it is the second most used search engine, there are still searches it doesn't get. Further, it doesn't try and keep results for searches below about 25 a month.

Now you may be thinking to yourself that if something is searched for less than 25 times a month you may not care about ranking for it … but that would be a "rookie mistake".

For one thing any source of business is a good one. Second, like I said earlier, some of my best business has come from pages that were optimized for the longest, least used search terms.

On top of that, if your site has a hundred pages, all optimized for long search phrases and all showing up in results 1 - 3, you will find your pages optimized for shorter key phrases climbing the rankings with little additional effort.

Danny Wall is a well known author and speaker on the subjects of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. He has a free downloadable seminar on the topics at http://www.dannywall.com/seo.htm.