Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail Keywords, just in case for those who are still wondering, are words stringed together to create a phrase that contains your keywords. It would be more appropriate if one calls it Long Tail Keyword Phrases instead of just keywords, but somehow, people prefer to omit the word “phrase”. Why are SEO experts and MMO bloggers so obsessed with Long Tail Keywords?

The sole reason for this obsession is because it makes their job to rank for their keywords easier and it makes a lot of sense as using long tails will allow them to target your traffic more specifically. For example, if your blog is about Baking Cucumber Cakes, ranking for the words, Baking Cakes or Cake Baking is something that you should not attempt to rank for as you would be up against millions of others blogs on baking. However, adding a couple of more words to that phrase would make a lot of difference. Thus if you work on the phrase, Baking Cucumber Cakes At Home or Secret Recipes To Bake A Cucumber Cake, chances of your blog ranking at the top spot is pretty good.

Using long tails have been the bread and butter for many MMO bloggers who understands the concept. Even though they might just get a fraction of traffic, those traffic nevertheless, are tightly targeted and highly valuable should they be selling recipe books on that topic.

However, due to relative ease for ranking with long tails, many also took this route to get traffic to their blogs which are not exactly concerned with whatever long tails that they ranked for. It is something some calls Bait and Switch. That means you bait your traffic with a good search ranking for an easily ranked long tail and when those searchers comes, they are presented with post contents or information that is not exactly what they have come looking for. The motive of the blogger is for those searchers to click on the Ads or affiliate products, which in the other way round, will be related to the long tails that they are ranking.

Google decided that, in order to keep it’s reputation as the best Search Engine in the whole wide world, they have to put a stop to this abuse. In the immediate future, if you want to rank for long tails, you will have to make sure your blog is about those keywords that you are ranking for. So if you are ranking for Grandmother’s Way To Bake A Cucumber Cake, you better get your grandmother to reveal her cucumber cake recipes to you. If you be blogging about making cheese cakes instead, (because making cheese cakes is hard to rank) your blog will be eaten up by Google (no pun intended), never too see the daylights again.

Matt Cutts confirms it.