The Key To Getting Good Search Rankings - Part 1

The other day we talked about long tail search optimization. If you have not yet read that post I highly recommend taking a quick look at it. In this two part post I am going to elaborate on the concept of long tail search and go over a simple 3-part rule I use for picking phrases.

Popular Phrases

Popular phrases are the ones that return at least 20 million results on Yahoo and Google. These phrases are nearly impossible to optimize for unless the first 50 results are poorly optimized and you optimize the heck out of your page titles, H1 tags, file names, etc.

You should only optimize for popular phrases if you know you can do it correctly.

Mediocre Phrases

Mediocre phrases are kind of good, but should also be avoided. These usually return anywhere from 5 to 20 million results. Just like with popular phrases, these can be hard to optimize for, although, it is still very possible get to highly ranked for them.

Perfect Phrases

Perfect phrases are incredibly specific. These are the “tail” of long-tail search, so obviously they have less than 5 million results, and they get much less traffic than the other types of phrases

Perfect phrases are really easy to optimize for, and it isn’t too hard to get first-page google rankings for them, which is why they are so much better. Using lots of phrases throughout your site that get a little bit of traffic is almost always better than using one or two phrases that get a lot of traffic. If you have read my article on long tail optimization then you know why.

Go to part 2

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