So you’ve secured some first rate rankings for some of your target keyphrases and you are looking to expand that traffic. Well, there are about a hundred ways to do this, but one of the most simple solutions that many people neglect is modifying your keyphrases to include some long tail. What’s long tail? Well, long tail keyphrases are considered those that are three or more words that may not have a huge amount of traffic, but that traffic sure is relevant and valuable, which is why utilizing this method can really make a difference your search engine referrals.

First you will need to start with some keyphrase research to find out what phrases are going to be the most relevant while also producing a reasonable amount of traffic. Now, the key to this is that these keyphrases should also include the phrases for which your site already ranks. For example, if your website ranks will for “dallas real estate” (which would be quite fortunate for you), you might start looking at phrases like “dallas real estate for sale” or “dallas real estate investment.” Though these only show approximately 1360 searches per month combined, they are more relevant and less competitive. The odds of securing rankings for these phrases with your highly ranked pages are quite good.

So once you’ve picked out these phrases, what now? Well, you don’t have to stick them in everywhere, modifying your title tag and every reference to the already ranking phrase. In fact I would not recommend this. However, using this long tail phrase in an Hx tag or two as well as in regular text and maybe even an alternate image attribute can be very effective.

Of course, the work doesn’t stop with these on-page content/code modifications. Now you need to get some great anchortext links using these new long tail phrases. I will leave it up to you how you decide to accomplish this. The long and short of it is that many companies are missing out on some great traffic they could be snagging from work they have already completed. Long tail modifiers utilize the page rank and relevancy of a page you have already worked hard to achieve high search engine visibility, so why not utilize it as much as possible? So get started on that research. It is well worth the investment.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Though it appears they have been testing this for some time, the search bar appearing in actual search results is a new one for me. A friend of mine saw them when doing a search for various photo sites and brought it to my attention. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Do a search for the query “Wikipedia.”



As you see, in the top listing for the main Wikipedia website, a search bar is included below the other site navigation results. As you conduct more searches, you will see that it seems a little odd that some major websites have the search box feature while others don’t. What do you suppose is the criteria for this? Are the sites that have a search bar in their name results hand picked by somebody behind the Google gates? Some notable searches that render a search bar in the top results are:

“imdb” “microsoft” “flickr” “youtube”

Then there are a few searches that surprisingly do not get a search bar in the top listing such as:

“film critic” “apple” “picasa” “google video”

Okay, fine, so some get the search bar and some don’t, but do you see any similarities between these two lists? I intentionally chose searches that would retrieve very similar results for companies that are very similar in size and nature. Is this just some addition to the sitemap that I do not know about? Perhaps some of you can shed some light on this for me?

Regardless, I think it is pretty slick. When you type in a search and proceed, the search engine provides a healthy list of results within that particular website that match your query. What might be even more interesting is to learn a little more about what that search algorithm looks like. What makes one reference to a keyphrase more relevant than another within the same website? I’m pretty sure it is not based on page rank, or maybe it is? And does this mean anything for those working on search engine optimizaiton for these major players?

Thoughts?


About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.