What are long tail keywords?

Using long tail key words in you site will help with getting seen in SERPs. Many people just starting out in affiliate marketing have no idea what the term means so I am going to give a short simple explanation.

If you will see my other hub about picking a niche I summarize how I decide on a niche by keyword competitiveness. Instead of trying to rank for a general keyword I try to get ranking for long tail keywords, which is actually a group of keywords.

For example "car" is a generic keyword and would almost be impossible to get a first page ranking for, however lets play with the key word "car". A long tail keyword derivation of car would be "buy a car", "rent cars", "sell my car" but even those long tails would be hard to rank for. So the more specific you get in your long tail keyword descriptions the higher you would rank for that term. Such as "buy a Dodge truck", "rent a car in New Mexico", "where to advertise to sell my car".

Here is where the downfall comes to long tail keywords. The long tails do not receive as much search volume so you have to make up for in quantity, which also helps build your rankings for the general keyword.

So when doing your keyword research make sure you include long tail keywords because that is where the money is.

Check out my hub on Linking Strategies.