Making the most of the long tail

Ideas and a journey

[danwhitehouse]

Hi all,
I've decided to go down the long tail route to try and get some quick wins for the co. that I work for.

Here's what I've done so far.

We have loads of ad groups running in ad words at the moment so I've found all the broad searches for these ad groups and exported the whole lot into a spreadsheet.

Next I pinched a fancy algorithm off the net to count how many words there are in each cell.

I've then put auto filter on and sorted the new column that shows the number of words ascending.

As a sample I've omitted all results apart from 100 five word keywords that I've isolated and run through the google keyword tool to find out monthly local searches on broad match.

I've then added the keyword tool data to the spreadsheet so I've got the 100 five word keywords with search volume data side by side.

I can then pull out the top 50 keywords by search volume and competition etc.

Next I've run these keywords through Rank Checker to find out the nearest relevant page on my site that thee keywords might already rank for so I know which page is most relevant for targeting.

Now what I want to do is rank for these keywords. I'm talking about a sure fire way to get P 1-3 easily for these terms for my site.

I can't effect much change on the site as it's HUGE and making any changes would be a nightmare..

Here are my options.

1. Add all the keywords and URLs into scrapebox and blast that lot with a pre approved blog commenting list that I've already created.

2. Write an article for each keyword and submit to the top 10 article sites using broad match for linking anchor text.

3. Social bookmarking using some tool like Bookmarking demon (If I can get it to work) I can't imagine getting any benefit from this.

4. Outreach - wont work. No definable anchor text.

I've a few ideas, but I'd really like some input on this. What are the best link building tactics for white hat optimisation for 1000s of long tail keywords at a time. I mean if each keyword gets 1 vist per month, there's no point spending a day on it..

Thanks!

[wheel]

Others will likely disagree, but I'm a big fan of the idea that to rank for a term, you need to have the content on the site. Generally, write a page for the search phrase you're trying to rank on.

Your approach conversely, seems to be getting keyword rich anchor text pointing at your site. Not what I would do.

It seems you can't publish large amounts of content on your site. So what about starting a discrete blog on a seperate domain. Put your keywords in some sort of priority order and start publishing articles for those keywords.

For link development, there's lots of low hanging fruit for a baseline plus there's additional places you can get blog-only backlinks (i.e. botw has a blog only directory if I recall).

[danwhitehouse]

Hi Wheel,
Thanks for your reply. One thing that I just started was a content strategy for the blog. We do have one, but it's not really maintained very well. What I might do is start up a 'daily' blog and optimise for one long tail per day. Do you think that's a good idea?

Thanks

[wheel]

Yes. Blogs can be handy for testing stuff, finding keywords, lots of things.

I've found one or two goldmine longtail phrases just by publishing blog posts/articles on fairly random stuff.

[danwhitehouse]

I've gathered a lot of the long tails I'm working with from Ad Words. I think it's far better to gain long tails from actual searches to your site / page rather than from a tool such as wordtracker.

Have decided to go down the WP theme root to see what can be explored there. Very interesting testing all these different LT techniques.

[linkbuildr]

wp theme root?

[wheel]

wp theme route (pronounce 'root' :) ).