Last month, we talked a little about the importance of long-tail keywords. This month we will dig deeper into the details on how to create excellent long tail keywords and phrases.

Tip #1 – Be Specific

Building upon last month’s example of our South American freshwater tropical fish importing company, you learned not to use the phrase “tropical fish” because that was too general of a term, and didn’t accurately reflect your business. A more suitable keyword phrase was “South American freshwater tropical fish” for your business.

One of the most overlooked aspects of site optimization is failing to optimize your graphics for SEO. A good website design for SEO includes images on every page, and within every blog post, to help attract and keep the attention of your users. The problem is, without a little help, Google can’t really “see” these images. Without text, Google has no idea how to process and categorize an image in terms of SEO. But this can be easily fixed by implementing these best practices.

Before we talk about the definition of a long tail keyword, we need to discuss the term “long tail” itself. Long-tail has been in use as statistical term describing frequency distribution since 1946, but has been recently popularized by Chris Anderson, author of the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. This book describes how stocking a large number of products with low demand or have a low sales volume can collectively equal the sales of all but a few very popular single products over a relatively long time period. This is how smaller or specialty companies can compete effectively against large, high volume businesses. The same concept applies to keywords.

SEO audits measure the performance of your website and how the site’s content is seen by the internet itself. Search engines are constantly scanning the internet for new content, and if you do not set up your website correctly, it won’t matter how great and helpful the content on your site is, the search engines–and therefore your customers–will not find your site.

Here are 5 reasons you need an SEO Site Audit right now: