When I first started in affiliate marketing I was told over and over use long tail keywords, for many months I tried using long tails with article marketing as I had been told this method would be like printing money. I soon found this not to be true, I had put up 22 articles got reasonable traffic and a few sales but my articles were not sitting at the top of search engine results like I had been told they would be. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I sat at my laptop of a couple of days thinking to myself why is this not working?!

The problem:

The problem was of course very fixable. It was simply that I had been using all the wrong long tail keywords. See I had been told that a long tail keyword was a keyword phrase over 3 words long, although this may be the case it is by no means as cut and dry as that.

For most niches there are lots of 3 word keyword phrases that are highly competitive, To get articles to rank well straight off the bat we need to do a little research, find the phrases that receive OK – good traffic and then hit them. I do not look for monster traffic keyword phrases simply because I know the chances of finding one is very slim, so you will do well to forget that right now.

Finding keyword phrases:

The way I look for phrases is to use the keyword tool here: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com (see my post about the best keyword research tools).

I start with a top level keyword. If I was looking for weight loss keyword phrases for example I might use “weight loss” below you can see what is returned if you do this.

So wordtracker tells us that the keyword “weight loss” is searched 7529 times everyday! That really is monster traffic. We need to look through the results and start looking at places we could maybe drill down.

You will see the keyword “fast weight loss tips” that has 355 daily searches, I drilled down on this keyword (by clicking it) and I go the following list:

In the list of keywords we have now been given I am going to look at “tips for fast weight loss” and the last two keywords in the list in more detail, I know 1-4 searches a day is not many, but with the long tail technique you should be looking at getting any where from 30 – 200+ positions in google. Quantity is key to this method.
Checking the keyword competition:

We need to see how many other people are possibly targeting these keywords and how well they are targeting them from that we can see if they are worth following up.

To start I always go over to google and put the keyword in speech marks like this “tips for fast weight loss”.

Doing this brings back the following information:

What I look for when I use this tactic, I look for the number of total returned results to be less than 50,000 when I’m looking for keywords that I’m going to focus on with SEO. In the case of simple article marketing I look for keywords with no more than 10,000 result less than 5,000 is perfect.

I then do the same search but use the following allintitle:tips for fast weight loss.

I am now looking to the total number of results to be less than 1000. As you can see it is much more than this.

This is not a keyword I deem worth chasing, the competition compared to the traffic value of the keyword just does not make it a viable option.

Time to move on.

Back to the original list of keywords returned by word tracker, looking down the list the keyword “natural weight loss” catches my eye. I do a drill down and of the results I see a few keywords I feel hopeful about I have highlighted them in the screen shot below:

Now lets look into the first highlighted keyword, same way as we did just a minute ago:

6,480 results is about right, this is looking positive.

allintitle: search confirms what the quotes search showed us, this keyword has potential.

With the information we have just got I would be happy to follow up “natural weight loss” with an article.
natural weight loss product – I wouldn’t follow up on this keyword 44,000 competing sites in quotes and 1,600 for allintitle.

natural weight loss remedies – 59,000 competing all in qoutes, and 3,200 for allintitle: so this one is a no go to.

safe natural weight loss – might be worth a shot 14,000 in quotes and 1,590 allintitle. It is on the very limit of what I might go after.

natural remedy for weight loss – 2,550 in quotes and 180 allintitle, this keyword has a traffic value of 1 search a day according to wordtracker. Running the keyword through googles keyword tool it bring back not enough data for the keyword for month just gone but give it an average of 73 searches an month. So you can expect this keyword to bring you somewhere in the region of 7-15 clicks a month.
Doing the google keyword search on this phrase shows us a few more keywords we could look into.

As you can see finding keyword phrases to use is not all that hard after all. If you know what you are looking for and how to check what you find then your success rate will increase hugely.

To your success,

David and Ashley

and remeber Focus, it is absolutly key to your success.

Tags: Keyword Research, Long Tail Keywords
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