A long tail keyword can best be described as a phrase describing the theme of your site, or the title of a product you are selling or the full title of a review that you have written.

An example of this is the keyword phrase "Ford Falcon four door sedan 2000 AU model" or "how to house train your Himalayan Chihuahua".

In this instance the keywords are Ford, or Falcon (A popular motor vehicle in Australia) and the second example is the Chihuahua, a dog.

The same long tail keyword phrase can also depict the make and model of a camera, a television set or a particular mobile telephone.

The fact that your describing in full the name of what you are discussing is known as a long tail keyword.

The opposite to this term is "keyword". A keyword is one single word such as telephone, needle, craft, medicine etc..

Unfortunately, and that is for most of us, we have entered the internet game a little late. All the best spots have been taken.

The first to arrive on the internet have seen the value on writing about a product or service and have taken the single keyword, such as credit or dog or telephone.

Because they have had that keyword on the search engines for sooo long, it means we cannot beat them for that keyword.

That leaves us with long tail keywords. Not everyone yet, has discovered all the variations possible for a keyword.

That is why when talking keywords everyone is saying go for the long tail keyword as it is easier to rank for.

The reason why long tail keywords work is because if you wanted to buy the latest blue ray plasma seventy two inch with sub woofer surround sound model T1456 television, then that will be what you write in your search engine task bar.

Whichever site has that long tail keyword phrase in their url, heading, content, pictures (alt) and incoming links will end up in position one.

Searchers nowadays often type in more then three words in a search engine mainly to narrow their searches down to be more specific and hopefully find exactly what they want rather then search through tons of sites looking.

Now that we know what a long tail keyword is we need to also narrow down the keywords we use in our long tail, especially anchor text. If you need to know more on anchor text I have discussed this at Anchor Text Backlinks.

Search engines see what they call "Stop Words". These words are and, the, then, that, where etc..

Search engines do not count stop words in anchor text or long tail keywords. Use this to your advantage by only having your descriptive words in your phrases.

Also, if you have a Wordpress blog and you are writing a new post, edit the url under the title of your post page by removing any stop words.

The same can be done here on Hubpages when you write your title of the hub.

Underneath you can edit the url and this is where you will only have your long tail keywords by removing any stop words.

When it comes to choosing your long tail keywords you will be doing what the rest of us have been doing for ages. Trying to find that one long tail keyword phrase that will return to us lots and lots of traffic to the page we have just written.

That's the hardest part. Making your choice. The best way to choose the phrase is to ask yourself, "If I was searching for what I am writing about, what would I type into the search engine to get this result?"

So when you choose your long tail keyword phrase, make that the title of your url, the title of your article or page and make mention of the phrase at the start, middle and end of your content.

When making anchor text backlinks you should change the order around of the phrase so you have different versions, all meaning the same long tail keyword, pointing to your site.

Now that you know what a long tail keyword is, you should be able to write your content around the phrase and you will find, if you choose the right phrase, a resounding success on getting a high or number one position on a search engine.

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