Choosing Long Tail Keywords

This is where the rubber meets the road. Choosing long tail keywords. This is the point where some people get nervous or feel like they don't know what they're doing. That's understandable ~ I mean come on . . . long tail keyword?!

Yesterday the task was to come up with a list of questions, concerns, and problems that your niche experiences. Did you get to 100? If not, don't worry, as time goes on you will see more things you can write down on your list, just remember to do it so you won't forget them later.

I bring up this list because if you look at it closely it could look very much like a list of . . . (drum roll please) Long tail keywords!!!! Did you guess that? It can also look like a list of TITLES for articles and Squidoo lenses!

So really there was a method to my madness you see.

Look at your list, what is the one issue you found came up most for your niche. What is their biggest problem, question or concern they are looking for an answer to?

Let's say you are working in the Cloth diapering niche (a niche close to my heart :) ). What's the one question people might really want to have answered. It could be one of many but let's say "How to clean cloth diapers" when I googled it with quotes it came up with only 5 other competing websites and there were google ads on the page!! That's a really good long tail keyword. (in fact I think I will stick with this example for the rest of the experiment) :) Here's what I mean by that:

---categoriesdescriptionemailfirstnamekeywordskeywords " "languagelastnamelinkspageloginpasswordrsstitleurl Advanced Search Preferences

Results 1 - 5 of 5 for "how to clean cloth diapers". (0.18 seconds)

As you can see the results this long tail keyword only brought back 5 other websites optimized for that keyword. That rocks the house!

You see the questions people want answered are going to be YOUR long tail keywords. Now you see that list is an invaluable resource huh?

When you're done choosing your long tail keywords you want to take it to google, and put it in quotes and see how many other competing sites come up, just like in the example above. If it's less than 10,000 you are good to go. Squidoo can easily outrank other sites with less than 10,000 competing. If you see there are google ads on your keyword search results this is an excellent thing. It means people are paying money for your keyword, so there is money to be made there.

Ok ~ check it out today, throw a couple of your long tail keywords through google and see what comes up. Find one that has less than 10,000 competing websites.

Tomorrow we're going to start building a lens around our chosen long tail keyword!

Have fun and see ya tomorrow!!

Jackie Lee:)