The Great Misconception of Long-Tail Keywords and SEO

[djbaxter]

The Great Misconception of Long-Tail Keywords and SEO
Jill Whalen
October 20, 2010

Jill Whalen critiques Ian Lurie's article SEO 101: Defining the long tail and tells us that you cannot optimize for long tail keywords:

[T]he crux of my disagreement [is that he] provides 3 made-up examples of long-tail keyword phrases, but in my opinion only 2 of them are truly long tail.

...

Where I start to disagree is with the third keyword phrase that Ian uses as a long-tail keyword: "red wool socks." While he was obviously just making up examples, "red wool socks" is unlikely to be a long-tail phrase ? it's what I call a "keyword gem."

There's a very big difference between keyword gems and long-tail keywords. Keyword gems are those that a lot of people use in the search engines, but they don't have as much competition as the much more general keyword "socks." This differs from long-tail keywords, which aren't used much in the search engines.

Long-tail keywords ? in the truest sense of what long-tail means ? are those that may get searched for only once a month, once a quarter, or even once a year. Sometimes even just once in a lifetime! In fact, they may never show up in most keyword research tools as viable keywords. (Especially now that Google has basically wiped them out of their keyword research database...but that's a story for another day.)

You Don't Optimize for Long Tail

Read more...

 

[theleathercollection]

Interesting read...I never really tested long-tail keywords, I actually found the research pretty annoying. I'll stick with my 3-4 word keywords