Long-tail SEO keywords and phrases are a very powerful tool that you can use to improve your website’s positioning in all of the major search engines. Before you get started you have to know what makes a long-tail keyword “long-tail”. The term is used to describe any key phrase with three or more words in it. The question remains however, how will you and your website be able to take advantage of these longer phrases to see superior results in the search engines?

The truth is that people don’t always make search queries with simple one or two word generic phrases. It’s much more common that a person would search for something like “42 inch LCD TV review” than for “LCD TV” or even just “TV”. Furthermore, it doesn’t make much sense to try to rank for a generic phrase such as “TV”.

Additionally, the competition for very generic phrases is extremely fierce, and it will be hard to show up prominently in the search engines for something as simple as “MP3″. The solution to both of the above problems is the incorporation of long-tail SEO keywords and phrases that will target your audience in a much better fashion while giving you a superior opportunity to rank well.

If someone searched for “TV”, they could be looking for TV shows, TV programming, history of the TV and so forth, none of which fall into your niche. Therefore the key to success is picking long-tail SEO keywords and phrases and here’s a simple approach for how to do just that.

101 Marketing Strategies Step 1- Research your Keywords: The first step in the process is researching the appropriate keywords and phrases that you would like to use. There are many free tools that you can use to help conduct your keyword research, and there are many other powerful, paid tools which you can use to help get a pinpoint target for your niche. You need to pick out keywords that are popular enough that they can lead to serious traffic for your site, but also ones in which the competition is low enough that you can quickly jump to the top. You’ll see that the competition for long-tail keywords is drastically lower than it is for generic one or two word terms, so your chances of success will rise greatly.

Step 2 in the 101 Marketing Strategies Guide: Using the keywords. Now that you know the long-tail SEO keywords and phrases that you want to be using you have to actually go about using them. Besides the actual page content of each of your web pages, there are many other areas where you want to use your keywords as well. They should be included in the anchor text of links between internal pages of your site, as well as within META tags, browse bar titles and more. Even ALT tags for your images can be utilized for better SEO results.

Step 3 in the 101 Marketing Strategies Guide: Evaluating and Marketing. Now that you have taken care of the onsite aspect of your long-tail keywords you have to take care of the offsite aspects. This means building incoming links to your site that will boost your position in the search engines and also lead to direct and referral traffic to your business. Once you have all of this completed, you have to remember that your job isn’t finished. Online marketing is a constant battle, and it’s always changing. That means that you have to constantly stay on top of things by tweaking, evaluating, judging, trying new things and more. If you put the time and energy into this that it requires, you’ll be able to build and maintain long term success.

The above three steps are an oversimplification of an effective strategy that you may use to help target particular long-tail SEO keywords and phrases. You have to put the correct time into researching your market and the keyword phrases they use, determining which apply to your niche and which you can rank for the best results. You then have to incorporate those phrases into your website and begin building links centered on those phrases, always adjusting and optimizing as you go. If you do this, you’ll be able to gain a much more prominent position in the search engines.