A long tail keyword is a three or four word phrase that is very specific to the item you are selling. They are geared at driving targeted traffic to a specific location. To understand a little better let's say that you are selling palm trees. Now when developing your content or advertisement you may think that using a keyword like trees would be a good idea, because after all a palm is a type of tree. The problem then becomes first the amount of competition you will have for that keyword, there are about 161 million results for the keyword tree in a Google search.
However try searching for the Chinese windmill palm tree and you only come back with 55 thousand results. That is still quite a large number but as you can see going from one keyword to four has dramatically reduced your competition.
The second issue you face when using one keyword as opposed to a long tail keyword is the traffic you will generate. Your goal is to sell your specific palm tree, so you have little need of traffic that are looking for oak trees. Therefore, along with narrowing the competition field you have also narrowed the traffic to people predisposed to buying what you are selling.
There is a down side to focusing too much on long tail keywords. When you build your pages around long phrases, you may miss more generalized traffic that could potentially bring sales. To negate this have several pages of each type on your site to keep a balance of targeted traffic and general traffic.
There are many tools available on the internet to help you decide on the best long tail keywords for your particular product. Programs like word tracker will help you by analyzing the best one and multiple word phrases to use on your site to drive targeted and convertible traffic.
Learn "Insider" affiliate strategy to generate thousands of dollars in less than 30 days without having any prior knowledge to internet marketing at: http://www.DeanDreyer.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dean_Dreyer