Keyword research is not particularly difficult. In part you can just enter your keyword into a search engine and view the results. What you do with those results is the difficult part of SEO. For many, the desired keywords are highly competitive and that is generally because short keywords are being used.

On the other hand, long tail keywords, while be far less competitive, can also be difficult to optimise. Here are a couple of examples:

Scotland SEO - returned over 415K in results
Scotland Search Engine Optimisation returned 138k in results
Scotland Search Engine Optimization returned 360k in results.

I have used the last example as a follow up to our previous post on search trends where we commented on the use of different spelling in keywords. This is a good example - the US spelling of optimization returned double the results.

While Scotland SEO may be our preferred keyword, the use of Scotland Search Engine Optimisation will provide far quicker results in terms of Page Rank and SERP results. Depending on your focus and target market, you may need to use all three keywords.

By using all three, you gain the relatively quick rise in rankings for the longtail keyword. The shorter keyword may take longer to develop in terms of rankings, however by gaining a foothold with the longtail keyword your path will be a lot smoother. As you rise up the rankings for the longer keywords, your visitor numbers will increase. With increased visitor numbers should come increased linkage. Using SEO as an example, are your visitors going to link to Scotland Search Engine Optimisation or just Scotland SEO. Obviously, with the increase in links, the importance of Scotland SEO rises and with it your rankings.

Whilst this is a narrow use of keyword research, if you take these philosophies and think outside the square, I am sure you could come up with many useful long and short keywords.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under Keyword Research, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.