Posted on January 17, 2008 by Tim Schroeder

What do you think is going to be harder to rank for in the search engines, “Web Hosting” or “Web Hosting Orlando FL?”

The answer to that is easy and pretty obvious. In most cases, the shorter the keyword phrase you are targeting the harder it will be to rank well for.

Doing a phrase match search for “web hosting” shows that there are 297,000,000 Google results. But doing a phrase match search for “web hosting orlando FL” only shows 314 results! Granted that people usually don’t search with quotes this can still give you a glimpse at the competitiveness of the specific keyword phrase.

Long-tail keywords are the hundreds of keyword phrases people search for but are often over looked in marketing. They generally are not your main target keywords but instead longer, specific keyword phrases. A lot of times you will hear how important long-tail keywords can be with PPC marketing but it can be equally as important for natural search engine rankings.

You can find great long-tail keywords using these keyword research tools I previously wrote about. Another way is by just looking through your web stats program such as Google Analytics and looking at what keywords people are using to find your website. Using your stats program, look at the other ways visitors are arriving on your website which are not already the main keywords you are targeting on your website.

If you only focus on a small set of the most popular keywords for your website, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic in your market (not to forget quicker, easier, natural search engine rankings).

To Your Success!