Search Engine Optimisation - What Are Short Tail and Long Tail Keywords?
If you want your website to be found, optimising your website for search engines (SEO or Search Engine Optimisation) is vital. What you need to do to optimise your site is fast changing and what once worked even a year or two ago might not work now.
The good news is that there are some strategies that always have and always will work. I'm goint to look at one of these strategies today and that is the importance in the difference between short and long tail keywords.
What is the Difference Between Short Tail and Long Tail Keywords?
The easiest way to explain this is to use a real world example. Let us say that your are a double-glazing installer. An example of a short tail keyword (or keyphrase) would be "double glazing". The upside of ranking well with such a short phrase is that there will be so many people using this phrase that your website visitors would go through the roof. The downside is that all your competitors would also be trying to get customers with this short phrase and that level of competition would make it next to impossible to anywhere near page 1. If you did manage it you would probable have spent tens of thousands of pounds on optimisation.
So take the keyphrase "hardwood double-glazing installer Nottingham". Sure, there would be far fewer visitors to your site with a phrase so specific but it has two important advantages. Firstly, it is far easier to rank on the first page of results with this longer phrase and secondly, the visitor who uses this phrase is much more likely to be a potential customer.
So Which Should I Use?
The short answer is both. Make sure your website has plenty of useful content and that the short phrase is used often (not too often though!). However, don't get hung up on rating on page one for such a phrase. What you are doing is showing the search engines what your business is about.
Try and pick as many long tail phrases that you can think of and ensure your website content makes liberal use of such phrases. Use them in your blocg or article system and have multiple pages dedicated to their use. Whilst your visitor numbers will not "sky-rocket" with this approach, there is a good chance it will have a very positive effect on your business revenue.
Next Steps
Your next step might be to opt for a website from Web Design Nottingham and see how we can help you with your search engine optimisation.