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Forty-Fifth E-Webstyle.com Internet Marketing Podcast Feb. 11th 2010.  Third page of Transcription

Paul: Yeah. He’s doing this and I’m like. They can’t see you, most of them. And he brought up a good point. Long tail keywords, this is a word that I’m not familiar with. And so, I’ve moved the concept, not the actual word. He brought in two words, long tail and short tail keywords. A long tail keyword is basically ‑ we’ll just go a short tail keyword would be stop smoking.

Chris: Yeah, quit smoking.

Paul: Or I want to opt ‑ here’s one. Here’s what I’ve never recommended. I want to optimize my website for the word Google. I know somebody has thought about that.

Chris: When somebody types in Google, I want to show up first.

Paul: Okay, I would not recommend that.

Chris: Probably no ROI there.

Paul: There you go. And the long tail version of that would possibly be is Google the best search engine? That’s a long tail keyword. That’s probably a bad example. But here’s ‑ let’s go to stop smoking.

Chris: Well, it’s interesting. So, the short-term and long-term have ‑ it’s a really interesting mixture of the phrases. ‘Cause the long tail keywords actually come from the classic bell curve, you know, that they either adjusted your grades in college or whatever and we all know that 90% are within the bell and then there’s this the long tail.

Paul: The guys below the curve that they’d get 100 on the exam. Yeah.

Chris: So, the long tail is also typically longer keywords. So, you know, instead of quit smoking, it’s quit smoking hypnosis CD Miami, right? So, it’s actually a longer keyword and it’s the long tail because ‑ they call it the long tail ’cause it doesn’t get as many hits as those words that are in the bell curve and it still gets enough traffic to go after. It’s easier to get. So, go after those first.

Paul: Yeah. Like he says, the long tail keywords get the short results. It’s much more specific as to what you’re looking for because it has more words. So, it’s going to give you shorter list of results. But, that shorter list of results is going to be more specific, and I’m going to tell you that those are the ones that’s really won our value.

And so, the short tail are the ones that are shorter in length and fit inside that Bell curve. If you get a short ‑ I was going somewhere with this. If you get a short tail keyword and you’re getting a lot of not relevant traffic, right? So, if all I’m selling on Patrick’s website is quit smoking hypnosis CDs, well, some people when they type quit smoking are looking for patches, you know.

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Paul: Like Nicorette gum. They’re looking for, you know, whatever it maybe. How do I advise my friend on how to quit smoking? They’re looking for all sorts of information related to quitting smoking that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the desire for a hypnosis CD. So, you know, those short terms, you may go after those and realize, you know what, that’s not as good. Whereas if somebody types in quit smoking hypnosis CD Miami, the state or city is not that important in that one, but we want that traffic and we have exactly what they want. So, it’s more, you know, likely to result in a sale. So, any effort I spend on that is valuable effort.

And I’d say the more specific you can be, the better. ‘Cause if they’re typing in ‑ if I’m not typing something that long, I know exactly what I want. I’m looking for this, this, this, and this. So, that’s going to be a prime sale or a prime sales opportunity for your company.

Now, I don’t want you to say or think I need to go after all long tail and drop all my short tail. Just understand there is a difference and you need to approach them differently. They will bring different results. Short tail will bring more results, less relevant. Long tail will bring less results, more relevant. So, you really need to think about this when you’re doing your SEO and you’re selecting your keywords and which keywords am I going to choose.

So, I thought it was a really cool article that I’m looking at the wall, but here’s where I am. So, by Kelvin Johnstone, Most Searched Keywords ‑ Not Always the Best Approach. I found it on Ezine. And I want to say thanks to Tee again at Tees Purple Martini Shop.

Chris: So, maybe we could make some recommendations for her. I’m sure you did in the phone call.

Paul: Yeah, I did.

Chris: What was she actually going after? What short tail was she after and what kind of long tail did you recommend?

Paul: Ah, I don’t remember. Specifically, I don’t remember those.

Chris: I don’t want to put you on the spot or anything though.

Paul: Well, I can say this. She ‑ like, she sells lots of purple gifts and trinkets and things, and she has a lot of martini items and bar glasses and things.

Chris: Does she sell like the fake ice with the fly in it?

Paul: I don’t know. Well, if it’s purple, maybe. And she ‑ I don’t remember specifically, but she was looking at some short tail keywords and I said, “Okay, these are fine keywords to go after, but remember.” I think it was like martini. I do remember it was martini.

Chris: And let’s just think about that. If somebody is typing in martini, their first opt, they’re probably looking for a recipe.

Paul: That’s what I would be looking for. So, if she shows up there, it’s not really that valuable to her. You know, what percentage of people who type in martini are actually looking to buy martini glasses? They are at least going to type in martini glass.

Chris: Yeah.

Paul: At a minimum. And I think that’s a good word to go after, but at the same time, you’re going to compete with everybody else that’s under martini glass. So, think about it.

Chris: So, does she sell purple ‑ I mean, does she sell plastic ones? I’m sure they’re like nice quality plastic martini glasses. So, plastic martini glasses is a long tail term that would be easier to get on the first page.

Paul: That’s a good one. I should have told her that. She’s going to listen now. She’s got it.

Chris: It would be easier to get on the first page and it would be very specific to hopefully draw to a product that you have. Now, add the word purple in there and, you know, it’s a no-brainer.

Paul: Yeah.

Chris: If they’re looking for a purple plastic martini glass, I’d say purple martini glass.

Paul: There you go. I mean, that’s ‑ I like that.

Chris: So then, those are the terms that should be very easy. She really probably should just ‑ she just needs to set up one page, optimize the text on her own page because not that many people are going to be typing that in, and she’ll do pretty well. That will be an easy thing to go after. So, there’s an example. Anything else that kind of pops to mind in your conversation with her? ‘Cause I think this real world example is really, really…

Paul: Oh, I love, yeah, I love it. And thanks for Tee for calling in and thanks to anyone and everyone that’s called in. I’ve got about four calls this month. And sorry Tee and AJ, you’re the only two that I actually wrote down. Sorry, I got busy, but I love this example of short tail and long tail and we’re having real world examples.

Chris: Alright. Well, we have about five minutes left. So, it was interesting ’cause before the end of the year, we are covering an article. I think it was John Reynolds who sent a letter.

Paul: John Reynolds at John Reynolds Media.

Chris: And I love that. The question was Google acknowledges that there are 300 things that they look for or use to determine search engine placement. And I know of ‑ it was content, keyword, and links. What are the other…

Paul: What are the other 297?

Chris: …297 then? So, we found an article, which is a really interesting article. It’s from SEOmoz and it was just covering, you know, the main things that are of interest. We were doing that by the end of the year, our first podcast in 2010. We decided to do a year-end review so we interrupted that process. Incidentally, the next few items in the continuation of what we were doing in 2009 is actually the stuff that we talked about in their kind of year-end review.

Paul: Yeah.

Chris: And so, they are worth going over again and we’re just going to do that really quickly just to wrap this up. What is important? Keyword, focus, anchor text from external links. And so, we’ve explained it a number of times before, but it’s worth explaining again. The great example I’d like to use, although this is an internal link example, is everybody uses the word home for people to get back to home. And, you know, Google probably has excluded that from their algorithm because everyone uses and the page that comes up when you press home has never anything to do with homes, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Chris: So, that’s a great example. Really, you need links on your page that go to your homepage that are, you know, let’s say, you know, plumber ‑ Houston plumber, right? So, your links need to be Houston plumber. You also need to have the home ’cause everyone, that’s for usability, and Houston plumber tells something to Google that home doesn’t. In fact, Houston plumber tells the right thing to Google and home tells the wrong thing to Google. Well, you also want that keyword text that’s linking to your website from external links to have the…

Paul: The right keywords, the keyword text. You want that keywords in your anchor text.

Chris: So, very important when you’re working on external links. By the way, if you’re not working on external links, you have to call us because you should be. That’s where you’re going to get your search engine placement from.

External link popularity, there’s kind of two. There’s quantity and quality. Where it says quantity, obviously that’s number, how many people are linking in. Quality is related to effectively the page rank of the website that’s linking to you. You know, a link from MSN coming to my plumbing shop is going to have a lot more value than a link from I don’t know.

Paul: Joeblow.com.

Chris: Joeblow.com. I wonder if there is a joeblow.com.

Paul: You don’t wonder. You don’t know what’s there.

Chris: Yeah. I like this one, interactive, excuse me, iterative algorithm-based global link popularity.

Paul: I don’t, man, I don’t even know what that is.

Chris: Let me translate that. Page rank.

Paul: Oh! Oh, yeah. I got that. I got that.

Chris: It’s just page rank. So, page rank, as we all know, is very valuable. Google recently took it off of the Webmaster tool page because they really don’t want you focusing on page rank. Remember, and I’ve got a good quote, which is your job when you’re doing SEO or your job as an SEO company is to provide a good user experience to Google’s users. If you do that, you’re going to do well in SEO.

So, that’s going to wrap up our 45th podcast, our second podcast of 2010. We really appreciate you listening. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Until next time, I’m Chris Burres.

Paul: And I’m Paul Hanson.

Chris: Bye-bye for now.