Using Long Tail Keywords in Your Blog Posts and HTML Web Pages. I was reflecting over the weekend on how simple it has become to be a webmaster. Today, there are many tools at your disposal to make a quality website. The list literally seems endless. There is blogging software, an array of content managements systems and a whole host off free, ready-made PHP scripts for just about any type of professionally functioning website one can imagine. I actually employ several of these on my own site as well as sub-domains and sub-folders. If you have any experience installing scripts and databases, the sky is quite literally the limit with what you can do online now with little to no coding experience.

This is a great thing. However, this phenomenon does bring with it new challenges to internet marketers as well as search engines. Being that these tools are available, a new swarm of webmasters has joined the internet marketing ranks with effective and professional tools.

Ahhh…enter SEO. Search Engine Optimization as you may well know at this point is a set of techniques by means of which webmasters optimize their websites so as to make it very easy for a search engine to determine what a website is about. There are many facets to SEO, both on-page and off-page. On-page techniques include optimizing title and meta tags as well as selecting keywords to name two and off-page techniques include things like link building. Good SEO is required these days, no exceptions.

One of the most important areas of SEO is good keyword selection. Good keyword selection is absolutely crucial to creating competitive content. Why? Well let us look at some numbers.

Say you wanted to write a web page or blog post optimized around the keyword “keyword”. If you type the word “keyword” into Google, you will see around 300,000,000 competing results as of the writing of this post. That, my friends is some pretty stiff competition. But, it only follows the natural order of things because, according to Google Adwords, that term is searched about 7,500,000 times monthly. Competition always follows quantity. If you are going to rank for that keyword, you are going to have some pretty amazing content on your page as well as a host of other websites linking to yours using text links expressing the same opinion.

Now, if you refine the keyword “keyword” to what we refer to as a long tail keyword such as “long tail keyword” you will notice that the number of monthly searches drops dramatically to around 5,400 searches. In other words, you move from the blue zone to the grey zone in the chart below. Again, competition follows quantity, so, accordingly, the number of competing web pages competing for this keyword drops dramatically to 1,740,000. I know, that number stills seems high, but in the SEO world, that is manageable.

So, here is the point boys and girls. Make your content work for you. When you create content, base it around long tail keywords. Yes, volume is lower, but the odds are, even with lower monthly search volumes, you will still receive more traffic from long tail keywords due to reduced competition. Over time, a large number of HTML web pages or blog posts will bring a large amount of quality organic search engine traffic which is the best kind there is.