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.

Simply put it is about the words that you use and how you put them together.  It isn’t about the fancy colors, images, flash, and videos; although, these help your visitors once on your web site, they do not help them find your web site.

Try a little exercise today and really watch the results you get.  In Google type in “website” and see what the results look like, see how many times you see the word “website” in the title and the text description of each web site.

Now, do another search with the term “web site”.  In this case take particular notice if the order of the web sites changed, or maybe you see a completely different set.

An added bonus, type in “websiet”, yes it is intentionally misspelled.  First notice that Google will give you a suggestion of what term they really think you are trying to search for, and usually Google will also display a couple of results from the word that it is guessing you are looking for.  Go below these suggestions and what is there?  The word is a real word, just not an English word.

One last thing to try is repeat these three searches in the different search engines and see what results come up, are there any similarities?

This exercise is all about getting an understanding about how a search engine treats a query (that is geek speak for “question”).  Each time someone is trying to find your web site they are searching with different terms, possibly misspelled terms, and more than likely variations in the order of the words.

What does this tell you about how to deal with the text in your web site?  A lot!

When a professional SEO company looks at the copy, or words, on a web site there are three things that are considered: keyword density, readability, and is it scanability.

To follow what a professional SEO company would do:

• Make a list of phases, three to four words, that you think people will use to find you.
• Look at the words currently on your web site; are any of the phrases currently on your web site?
• Is there more than one combination of that phrase on you web site?
• How many times do you mention those phrases?
• Are those phrases used in your headings?

Small changes to your text on your web site can mean gigantic changes to the way the search engines read your web site, as well as the ability to match what you are saying to how people would find you.

Happy keyword hunting!

Now I don’t want to get caught up in the semantics of what they’re talking about… that would likely lead us off topic – but ever think about what it’s really accomplishing?

Well search engine keywords aren’t too much different… think about it… “My keyword ranks number 1 on Google, and number 3 on MSN and Yahoo… Beat that!”

This is what I call a “Keyword Trophy”. Where you get some mythical prize if you rank number one for some set of keywords. But is a keyword trophy really worth anything? Sometimes, but usually not.

Let me explain. If you had no competition, then what is the real value of a keyword ranking? There isn’t one. For instance, I bet I could create a site today and rank number one on most search engines for the keyword phrase “itchy witchy seems kinda funky but might pay me more money in the long run” – some random made up phrase that I’ll now rank for, but how many people are going to be searching for it? And more importantly, what are they going to do with it?

That’s kinda my point here… the “what are they going to do with it” part – Your goal is conversions, and new customers right? So if all your keyword trophies aren’t converting, then what is there value? Do you see where I’m going with this? Conversions and customers are the real goal of Internet marketing and search engine optimizations… not top rankings. Does this mean that you should stop trying to rank high? nope. Not at all. But focus on the important keywords… the ones that convert traffic into customers. Otherwise all those SEO consultant fees aren’t paying for themselves… just your ego and the size of your… whatever it was that was being measured.