Leveraging the Long Tail
Ranking in the SERPs for broad competitive terms is hard and requires that several factors all come together to convince the Search engines that your page is the best result for that term. One thing that you need in order to rank for a competitive term is several high quality links from other sites.
An ideal link would have these properties:
- It would come from a page that ranks for your keyword
- The anchor text would contain your keyword
- The linking page would have few if any other out going links
- The link would not be “no followed”
Unfortunately these are all things that you have no control over unless you own the linking website. Which brings me to leveraging the long tail…
From a comment on SEOmoz.org -
Ranking for long tail is relatively easy. Now what I would recommend is ranking well for multiple long-tail keywords for different landing page and then flowing the link juice from those multiple landing pages to a handful of landing pages. The internal link flow should help you to rank better on the more popular terms.
Example rank well on xyz widgets, xyz wombat widgets, widget bats xyz and then link those three landing pages to widgets. You’ll rank better on widgets because you have three related landing pages that are ranking well that link to the widgets page.
Brent should have his own SEO blog.
Ranking for the long tail is easy. Try this sometime - optimize a page for a unique long tail term using on page factors, (check this post - On Page SEO for WordPress) and a few links sprinkled around your site - be sure the page is included in your XML sitemap. Wait a couple of weeks then Google for your term. If your page has been indexed you will probably find it at or near the top of the serps.
Brent’s suggestion is that you create several of these long tail pages on your site and then point links from each of them back to your broad term page. Brilliant. I don’t really know if it works or not, but I’m going to find out. I’m very confident of one thing - if the long tail pages contain some quality content the exercise will certainly be good for the site. If it does work, then leveraging the long tail will be a welcome tool in my kit. It probably won’t make you rank high for Viagra, but if you’re after that term what are you doing here?
LOL! First off, thanks for the suggestion on my own blog . . . maybe someday.
I have found the tactic of having long-tail keyword landing pages that flow to more broader terms to be very successful. Make sure you use the nofollow tag on your internal links to properly ‘flow’ the link juice/page rank value of the page to the proper pages. It will help to prevent leakage.
Again, thanks for the post!
Brent D. Payne