One of the things SEO specialists often talk about is the power of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are the search terms with 3 or more words that don’t have high search volume. The shorter keywords have higher search volume but in aggregate, the long tail keywords provide the bulk of a site’s search traffic.

For example, you can have a Europe travel site that ranks well for europe travel but the majority of your traffic will come from terms like:

• europe travel deals
• europe travel guide
• europe travel packages
• europe travel books
• cheap europe travel

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For many bloggers, when they first get interested in SEO, they will go after the most competitive keywords first.  A web design blogger will optimize his site to target web design.  A gadget blogger will go after gadgets.  However, this is usually a bad strategy.

Short keywords like web design, gadgets, and social media are very hard to rank for.  For a new site, if you do everything right, it could take months and oftentimes years before you reach the front page of the search results.  And even then, there could be 10 other sites that do SEO better than you, so your site would be left languishing on the second page.

Now you may be happy with a second page or even a third page ranking, but most people don’t visit those pages.  Aaron Wall, a prominent search expert, writes:

There is no award, little traffic, and virtually no value for ranking on page 2 or page 3, even if it is for an exceptionally competitive and high traffic keyword like credit cards.

So, what’s a blogger to do? read more

Ian had a great question in a comment on my previous post. He asked:

How do you judge the balance between lots of people will be looking for that [popular keyword] against there are lots of results for that [popular keyword]?

Using your example, for “nba all star game 2009″ you’d be one of 500,000 results so how do you decide if that’s a worthwhile keyword to use?

There are couple things to consider when picking keywords to target. read more