Do you recommend lower volume, long tail keywords?
For instance, say you want to rank for "how do I cook" building it specifically, "how do I cook chicken in a toaster oven" (obviously not a real idea, but same concept)
That entirely depends.
What i currently find best is lumping multiple small keywords together and writing one long pillar article.
It looks something like this:
Home page: transportation
Category: cars
Individual article covers:
Seed keyword: ford focus
Longtail keywords included:
Ford focus side view mirror
Ford focus spoiler
Ford focus reviews
Etc.
This is the basic gist for a large website. This is to prevent multiple pages targetting the same keyword.
The trick is to find low comp keywords and then find all decent long tails. Write your article around them.
For smaller websites (popular micro niche sites) often have a long article on the seed keyword and supporting articles based on those long tails.
Option three is the "pure seo approach" which are thin sites hitting a couple leywords which are profitable and then doing a lot of link building.
I have gone through seo changes over time, and what i find effective is method one (single article completely covering a keyword) , and three.
Micro sites are how i build web 2.0s. I find traditional micro sites tend to not rank as well because of content canibalization and issues with seo hitting multiple pages with the same anchor texts.
The guide i wrote focusses on beginner seo. So not option three. Those sites can be called churn and burn, but that has evolved over time.
Sorry, i have a habit of diatribes. For a long term site, i suggest option one because those rank better in my experience with less seo effort (and less risk).
I am quite new to SEO as a whole and where the whole thing gets confusing is the web 2.0 part and the contextual stuff.
Can someone please shed more light for me ?
Thank you
Cheers
Contextual means within text.
You can have a link in a forum signature, in the footer of an article as a resource, as a comment under an article, etc.
Contextual means the link is within an article.
Web 2.0s is a platform type. Essentially it would be free blog platforms like blogger or tumblr. They are free contextual links.