What is your method for going after long tails?

I hear all the talk about the big keywords, but I think we forget about those long tail, ready to buy searches. Usually a lot easier to rank, especially for a brand new site. I have yet to figure out a strategy to go for such long tail keywords.

How do you target your long tails?

Two ways, both ways are difficult
1) High PR blog comments (I create AA lists for this task and do page PR) with random long tail inserted... I then backlink those backlinks with a few million crappy links
2) I do several pyramids with randomly selected anchor texts from a long tail list I made

Good luck finding a more successful way than one of the above

Expertpeon said:

Two ways, both ways are difficult
1) High PR blog comments (I create AA lists for this task and do page PR) with random long tail inserted... I then backlink those backlinks with a few million crappy links
2) I do several pyramids with randomly selected anchor texts from a long tail list I made

Good luck finding a more successful way than one of the above

Click to expand...

Nice.. your number 2 strategy was the way I was going to start doing.. Number 1 strategy I might give a try. Thanks

I target long tails based on the search count. If they have good exact monthly searches like >100 and good CPC, I post a separate post targeting that keyword. If the search volume is very less, I use the same in my content where it is very relevant to the main topic.

cyberzilla said:

I target long tails based on the search count. If they have good exact monthly searches like >100 and good CPC, I post a separate post targeting that keyword. If the search volume is very less, I use the same in my content where it is very relevant to the main topic.

Click to expand...

This is a bad idea... for a lot of reasons.
Google's keyword tool displays only a fraction of the 500-1000 searches/mth related to your keywords.

If you have google webmaster tools you can see the crazy traffic sources you get every day (or if you have piwik even)

Say you get 100 impressions in a day from a keyword like "How to save a person who's drowning" ... google keyword tools almost def doesn't include that.
In fact, the above indicates that keyword may be a 10k+ search per month keyword phrase.... but it won't be in the tools.

cyberzilla said:

I target long tails based on the search count. If they have good exact monthly searches like >100 and good CPC, I post a separate post targeting that keyword. If the search volume is very less, I use the same in my content where it is very relevant to the main topic.

Click to expand...

Yeah I was going to suggest the same. If it has enough searches, than get a keyword optimized post going. Spend $2-3 getting it written, and have your "sales funnel" either in the sidebar or at the bottom of the posts.

Grab a list of keywords. Outsource the posts, and then watch them rank. A few high pr links goes a long way on these pages.

englandrm said:

Yeah I was going to suggest the same. If it has enough searches, than get a keyword optimized post going. Spend $2-3 getting it written, and have your "sales funnel" either in the sidebar or at the bottom of the posts.

Grab a list of keywords. Outsource the posts, and then watch them rank. A few high pr links goes a long way on these pages.

Click to expand...

lol, custom pages for each long tail? jesus, count me out.
I have pretty darn good success going after these keywords with minimal extra postings... not to say I don't do it, I do occasionally, but yeah...
What a fruitless endeavor, and a pricey one.

You can easily take 5-7 longtails and send them to a decently optimized post.

Expertpeon said:

This is a bad idea... for a lot of reasons.
Google's keyword tool displays only a fraction of the 500-1000 searches/mth related to your keywords.

If you have google webmaster tools you can see the crazy traffic sources you get every day (or if you have piwik even)

Say you get 100 impressions in a day from a keyword like "How to save a person who's drowning" ... google keyword tools almost def doesn't include that.
In fact, the above indicates that keyword may be a 10k+ search per month keyword phrase.... but it won't be in the tools.

Click to expand...

Never in my life time I received traffic more than what keyword tool shows for a given keyword! I target keywords based on the exact search count. So in your point of view, I should write blog post each and every long tails what keyword tool shows?? No way! I don't want to spend my time, money and effort targeting those "very low" search volume keywords.

cyberzilla said:

I target long tails based on the search count. If they have good exact monthly searches like >100 and good CPC, I post a separate post targeting that keyword. If the search volume is very less, I use the same in my content where it is very relevant to the main topic.

Click to expand...

That's basically what I do too, although I don't really put a number on it. For a large proportion of long tails you don't need a separate post, your pages will rank just from having the keyphrase on the page and a good spread of randomized anchor text. I would say most of what you find somewhere that's not the Google keyword tool (eg. most of your Wordtracker keywords etc) would fall into this category. When I generate the keyword list for a new site, I generally use around 50% keywords from my top 20% by traffic list for that niche (80/20 rule), and 50% random long tails.

Long tails is one of the few cases where your internal linking and anchor text can also have a strong effect in my experience.

My whole strategy is essentially based around long tails... Fuck competing with every other dog for the high volatility head keywords. Long tails is where it's at!

cyberzilla said:

Never in my life time I received traffic more than what keyword tool shows for a given keyword! I target keywords based on the exact search count. So in your point of view, I should write blog post each and every long tails what keyword tool shows?? No way! I don't want to spend my time, money and effort targeting those "very low" search volume keywords.

Click to expand...

You didn't get my point,
Google keyword tool displays maybe, at best, 5% of the keywords that get >1k/mth
my suggestion is watch your traffic, pull keywords from your impressions every day, and then send them to RANDOM blog posts (don't even need to be new, optimized or whatever)
Yeah it helps if they're in the meta desc at least, and you may want to toss those into some posts for the boost on better long tails, but for MOST it won't matter... the competition is non-existent for 1000s of keywords surrounding each keyword.

To target long tailed keywords I build several link wheels all with the same anchor text but at strictly different sites. The keywords I have already present with me so it is not really a problem. Then I do blog submission and forum posting. Can't say I am too successful but I am working on it.

Some good points here.