You may not be familiar with the term “long tail keyword”, but it is a simple concept really. If you are one to watch the statistics on your web site (if you’re not, you should), then you would know that sometimes people will find your web site using the most unusual phraseology.

Unusual phrases, the ones that are very targeted and specific, are referred to as the long tail. In short, it is the sweet spot of searchers that know exactly what they want. However, the downside is there are a lot fewer searchers that ride out there on the long tail.

Many Internet marketers make a great income focusing their marketing efforts using long tail strategies. The magic that makes it work is a searcher that knows exactly what they want and a web site that provides it.

Using a long tail keyword strategy is really no different than thinking in terms of niches, and as you may know, “there are riches in niches!”

Each web page on your web site is a niche, and it should be treated as a separate entity. Each individual page should have its own audience, marketing plan, and on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

Looking at a typical shopping cart, assuming you are selling books, there are hundreds of individual pages and each page is dedicated to an individual book. Think of Amazon.com as a book search engine, and each time a person enters a book title into Amazon.com, the results displayed contain all the web sites known to Amazon.com as having that book for sale. If you have never shopped on Amazon.com, I encourage you to search out a book, you will find that Amazon will usually stock the book and will offer to sell it to you; however, they will also display all the online used bookstores that you could also purchase from.

The top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are no different than Amazon.com. When a searcher enters a particular book title, the search engines are displaying pages when the book title is somewhere on the page. The search engines will not display the homepage simply because the web site as a whole has that book somewhere on it. A common misconception is the search engines see your entire web site as a whole, when in reality the search engine only sees one page at a time.

Take this one step further and put yourself in the shoes of a person searching for this book. Notice, I did not say your company. Assume that this potential customer does not know your company name, for that matter, they don’t even know you exist, or that you have the book they are looking for. This potential customer will enter a search string into the search box of their favorite search engine, and it is quite possible that it is not even the correct title of the book. So, how are they supposed to find you?

Looking at all your pages as individual marketing vehicles, we will take this example just one more step. If you carry a book on your website with the title, “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” and with a little research you find that there are a lot of people that enter “SEO in Minutes” in the search engines. You now know the web page that has the book “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” needs to contain the term “SEO in Minutes” somewhere on the page, several times if possible.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword tool is a good place to start to find those unique phrases that you should have contained on a given web page. There is also the capability to look at an individual page as Google sees is and identify if there are keywords that you are missing.

What you should come away with:

• Treat each web page as its own niche
• Each web page on a web site has a different audience
• Direct visitors to internal pages – they can find their way to the homepage if needed
• Know what terms are being searched for and make sure they are on the web page

Think like a professional SEO expert and see each web page on your web site as its own freestanding entity.