There is not a real difference between targeting short tail and long tail keywords, however I do recommend the following points:
- Use long titles with more than 40 characters but make it no longer than 70 as it may be shortened by search engines
- Consider a meta description with less that 156 characters but mention your target long tail target keyword once there
- Use your long tail keyword in your article various times but be careful. Too many repetitions could be considered as a black hat. There's no real guideline for it but I do not recommend more than 4.5% keyword density. It means that in an article with 2000 words, not more than 8 or 9 times of repititions
- Use your long tail keyword in the first paragraph and preferably at the start of it.
- Use H1 and H2 tags for paragraphs containing the long tail keyword.
- Consider backlinks. But their importance is overstated by most of the SEO specialists. I own many competitive keywords without these backlinks. Backlink is an old story and people have so much cheated and abused it that most of the search engines do not give it a high weight now. Instead:
- Consider a few links to the other domains and some internal links too.search engines love content clouds, not some kind of topic born out of no-where and related to nothing! Isolated content islands are not loved by them anymore.
- Consider forelinks seriously. which links are you suggesting in your article. Are they really useful for the audience? Or you are just trying to cheat them to click somewhere and buy rank for you? the best link (no matter outgoing or inside your blog) is a link which user clicks and goes there and stays there for a long time. It would mean for search engines that you make valid and useful recommendations.
And as everyone knows but forgets to say: You can throw all above recommendations away but consider the core rule of SEO:
Write an original useful content having satisfaction and smile of the user in your mind. All the other things will be done automatically without this dirty tricks.