If you have been to my site or blog before you know that I’ve always been a big fan of organic search traffic because it is so economical and fits right in with the low budget approach of promoting a small or home business.  In this article I’m going to explain how you can still get good rankings within the search engines even with the most competitive search keywords.  I’m not sure who coined the name “long tail search,” (possibly searchenginewatch.com or view the Wikipedia Long Tail Search definition) but it’s one of the simplest ways to rank well within a highly competitive search term.

What does “long tail search” mean?  It’s the process of being found by the search engines under a string of three, four or more keywords rather than one or two.  Let’s take the example of a site for gardening.  Let’s say that the primary keyword phrase is “gardening.” Gardening alone is a highly competitive keyword which brings up over 57 million results in a simple Google search.  “Vegetable gardening” narrows down the field to a little over 11.7 million results.  It’s very difficult when you are first starting out to rank well for such a broad term as gardening. Even if your site is just about general gardening.

How can you get ranked well within your chosen site niche?  The answer is to use a long tail approach.  Build your site around your favorite keywords such as gardening and vegetable gardening but include longer search phrases as well.  Say you are based in New England where the soil conditions are rocky and acidic, you might write an article about “vegetable gardening in New England soils.”  This phrase now becomes a long tail search term in several ways.  The title, the search phrase within the keywords meta tags and the H1, H2 or H3 meta tags associated with the title.

What you have accomplished is a narrowing down of the playing field.  By this I mean you have introduced your site into a smaller and less competitive search arena.  Now individuals who are looking for gardening tips for New England soil conditions are more likely to find your site. It comes down to pure mathematics. Instead of spending a fortune on advertising or competing with millions of sites for a single search term you now bring people to your site via the long tail search.  Once they find you they will then look further into your site.

In addition to providing you with specific long tail searches the long tail search also provides “deeper roots” for your site, meaning that it becomes associated with more meaningful and relevant information.  Search engines like this kind of stuff, as it makes sense that you are more than a general guide to gardening but also provide authoritative insight into the subject as well.

One of the major benefits in using Google as a partner on your site is the amount of information they provide to you in support of their programs.  A good example is a recent blog post on the Google Custom search box.

Google recommends using their search box for added revenue on your site.  A few weeks back Google announced improvements in their search feature allowing greater control over site customization.  Utilizing the custom search engine is a sure way of increasing total revenue on your site.  Their recommendations for maximizing your site revenue are:

1. Always place search boxes in highly visible or easy to find locations.  In this way your readers will have quicker access to finding information on your site.

2. When possible add two search boxes to long pages to provide easy access to search functionality.  This works particularly well with pages that need to be scrolled.

3. Host your search results on your own site.  This recommendation makes sense because if you want to create simple navigation within your site, utilizing your own template and containing the search results on your own pages works really well.

4. Add a search box to your search results pages.  This makes a lot of sense because if the results of the search didn’t meet your viewers expectations they have the opportunity of performing additional searches.

5. Customize your ad locations.  If you follow the logic in item #3 above then this will make sense to you, because you can easily add your own advertising to your search results pages.

Some of my own thoughts are to try and integrate the look of the search engine results to mirror your own template.  This adds to the overall customization of the search results pages and also improves readability and flow.