About long tail keywords

I described the general keyword research in my previous blog entry and showed that sometimes the results can be pretty ineffective. It is getting harder to get to Top 10 in Google when your keywords are facing competition from billions of other web pages that are already using them.

I think, that is why a lot of SEO companies united in one chorus started talking about long tail keywords. After all, how long one can manipulate organic listings when everybody wants to be in Top 10? Besides, now that Yahoo and MSN searches combined together are way behind Google searches, it is natural to assume that the web site owners want to have their keywords on the first page of Google organic listings. Most of them would not care for their keywords to pop up on Ask.com or Dogpile or a pile of other search engines that nobody even heard about.

My problem with long tail keywords is related mostly to the combination of SEO and web analytics. We all know that long tail keywords that people search for don’t account for a great deal of searches. My question is - can they really provide significant traffic?

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