Hey, what are keywords and why are they so important? What’s this stuff about local keywords lately? And what about long tail keywords?

Welcome to this week’s episode of Easy SEO and More: The Stingray and Other Long-Tail Keywords.

But I’m not going to bore you by going over how Joe Bob did keywords on his website and how keyword density works in certain areas and things like that. Don’t worry about that.

What I’m going to do today is talk about just how you can do keywords yourself with your company, because keywords are going to be different for every company. Not necessarily every single company but pretty much because if you think about it, let’s say you’re a plumber in Atlanta Georgia: Your keywords could be different and will be different than a plumber in Las Vegas.

If nothing else, the city keyword will be different. So, today we’re going to talk about everything to do with keywords.

So, what’s up with tail keywords? Well long tail keywords to me it’s just some SEO person had nothing better to do than to think: “Hey, what’s a more difficult way that I can come up with to say a key phrase?” See a keyword is one word like SEO or plumber or accountant, something like that. A long tail keyword would be: “Austin accountant,” “Las Vegas plumber,” and so on.

So, a long tail keyword is more than one word. But what it really is, is just a keyphrase. Why they call it “long tail keywords” I don’t know, but it’s just a key phrase.

So, a keyphrase is just more than one keyword and local keywords. It’s a keyphrase even if you have the city name in with your business name.

Now of course if your business is in Fairview, which is one of the most common names of a city, you might want to think of doing the state as well, like Fairview, WV. I don’t even know if there is one in West Virginia, but you get the idea.

That’s what long tail keywords are. The best way to come up with keywords is to ask your customers.

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, then you have old customers who have found you on the internet. Ask how they found you, ask what they typed in to get to you (what keywords/keyphrases they used). Those are going to be the best keywords you can use.

Of course, you can also check your competition. Click here to go to the Port Bell SEO Tools area. The two tools at the bottom, under research, are:

• Keyword Research and
• Competition

You can find out who your competition is for a certain keyword and find out what other keywords they use. Another thing you can do at the top where it says search engine, go to the google SERP (SERP just means “search engine results page”) and type in your competition’s name. Find out what keywords they’re using and that way you can find out what keywords might be the best for you.

Of course, you may not want to use exactly the same keywords that they use, but keywords aren’t copyrighted so they don’t belong to them. You can use whatever keywords you want to use. (Competition has been stealing my keywords for many years now.)

The next biggest question I get is where to use keywords.

And the top two places, of course are your website and your blog. But you don’t want to put Miami plumber, Orlando Plumber put all the city names and Florida plumber at the bottom of your page; that’s called spamming and the search engines know what that is, and they will dig you for that now.

So don’t do it. But putting the keywords in with your regular text is a great way to do it.

Make sure that you have an H1 (Heading 1) tag. if you’re not familiar with an H1, it’s the main heading on your website. WordPress is not too difficult to change a paragraph or a sentence into into your Heading One or your Heading Two (here is an article that explains how to do it in WordPress).  I’m going to talk more about headings in another episode and I’ve talked about it a little bit before as well if you want to listen to some of the past episodes.

Use your keywords in your normal text. Even in the alt tags for your images. Use them everywhere on your website, use them in your blog but don’t do too many keywords. And this is one of the reasons why, in another episode I said it’s a great thing to have 2000 words for each of your main web pages. That’s the web pages about your products and services. If you have 2000 words, you could have 20 keywords, and nobody would care. But if you only have 200 words and 20 of those are keywords, it’s going to be obvious what you’re doing and it’s not going to read well for people.

Remember, your website and your blog are first for people and second for the search engines.

As much as we want to make it about the search engines. It really isn’t about that, is it? It’s about people; because without people we’re not going to be in business.

And of course, the next place you can use keywords is social media. Social media has opened the floodgates. You can find social media posts on all the major search engines now. And so, it’s a good idea to start doing keywords more. Even on social media.

Hey, this is Dr. Ty, CEO of Port Bell SEO. Thank you so much for listening. And I’ll talk to you next week.