Long Tail Keywords and Google Pagerank
When you begin optimizing your site for the search engines, there are many things you need to consider. One thing you need to do is narrow down the competition that you are fighting with for the same spots on google. For instance, if you are a wedding DJ, based in Texas, it will be a lot of wasted time and energy to get your website all the way to the top of Google for people that search for the keyword “wedding.” Sure, you will get tons of traffic, but your DJ business in Texas will not benefit from the majority of this traffic. Odds are, if someone is searching for a DJ for their wedding based in Texas, they will search for something more along the lines of “wedding dj’s texas” or something along those lines. These types of keywords are called long-tail keywords. These keywords do not get as much traffic as keywords such as “wedding” or “dj,” but there are many benefits to being at the top of the search engine ranking pages (serps) in the long-tail keywords. The greatest benefit is that the traffic you get from the long-tail keywords is obviously very interested in your service. If you had people going to your website that searched for “wedding” it is very likely that they are looking for a wedding dj 500 miles from you or even more. They probably aren’t even looking for a DJ. When someone searches for “wedding dj in Austin, Texas,” this is a very hot lead. They are looking for the exact service that you offer. You are much more likely to turn the visitors to your website into actual paying customers when they arrive to your website by searching with long-tail keywords.
Another important thing to remember when trying to rank high in the serps, is that Google loves content. There are a lot of mysteries regarding what Google actually looks for when doing the search rankings, but two things are for sure: Google loves good, unique content as well as quality backlinks.
What does it take to make quality content? When you are writing articles for your webpage, it is good to use the keywords you are trying to rank with, to consist of about 2-3% of your articles. You do not want to use the keywords too many times, just make sure you use them at least once. Another great way to boost traffic is by putting videos on your website. Also, creating your videos and uploading them on youtube can help drive traffic to your website. When people search youtube and find your video, you can point them to your site. You can do this by watermarking your video with the URL of your website. You can also put the URL in the description of the video.
Now I am going to explain what I mean by “quality backlinks.” A backlinks is any link on the internet that will take someone to your webpage. There are many ways to get backlinks. You can post links on message boards, your other webpages, by leaving comments on blogs, and many other methods. So your next question may be, “How do we know if the link is quality?” Well, Google ranks all websites. The way they rank them is by PR or page rank. They are ranked from PR0-PR9. The higher the PR, the better. If you can get links to your website on PR9 sites, it is very helpful in moving your site up the rankings of google. One of the best ways to get quality backlinks to by creating social bookmarks. Many of the social bookmarking sites are ranked as high as PR8.
How do you determine the PR of a website? After all, it is not like when you visit a website, the PR is listed in bold numbers and letters on the front page. There are add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you have not heard of Mozilla Firefox, it is an alternative web browsing option. I highly recommend it, as it provides much quicker web browsing, as well as more security measures in protecting your computer. Back to PR. Once you active these add-ons they will show the PR of each page you visit. This will usually displayed in the toolbar of your browser. If you do not like adding things to your internet browser, there are websites that show you the PR of sites that you list for them.