Longtailing is the process of targeting keyword phrases that are more than just a couple of words. While a lot of people can’t actually define what a long-tail keyword phrase is, a whole lot of marketers ignore going after them anyway, discounting them for getting very low traffic. What most marketers miss though is that by creating a 1000 pages that are optimized for long-tail keywords, you can potentially gain more traffic that you would from the most popular terms on the web. The reason is simple. Longtail keyword phrases are less competitive and often have a higher KEI, which means you can get ranked on the top of Google SERPs for a whole lot of long-tail phrases.

A former boss of mine used to think that longtail keywords are a waste of time and not “worth our effort.” I did explain to him that longtail keywords tend to convert better too, but I guess some people rather take the short way out. The moral of story is, if you want to really have a chance of getting decent free traffic from search engines, you should definitely try optimizing for both short and long tail keywords. There is simply no excuse for not doing so!