Keyword Targeting: Long Tail vs. Short Tail

Keyword research and targeting is one of the most essential and effective practice in Search Engine Optimization because these search terms or keywords are ultimately what search engine users will use in order to find for the information they want from the internet.

Keywords can basically be categorized into two main groups, which are short tail and long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are narrow keywords which are often used to target less competitive and specific niche markets while short tail keywords on the other hand are rather broad and general keywords and are usually highly competitive. A quick example of a short tail keyword would be "SEO Agency" while a long tail keyword would be something like "SEO Agency London Ontario".

When you compare both versions of keywords in the search results, "SEO Agency" has nearly more than 13 times as many competitors as "SEO Agency London Ontario". This also shows that the short tail keyword has a much significantly higher search frequency as compared to the long tail keyword but an equally large proportion of these searches can also be made up of a large number of similar and more specific search queries such as "SEO Agency London Ontario".

You should be able to get a clearer picture of the statement by referring to the following SEO infographic by Datadial:

Many would rather be targeting on hundreds to even thousands of long keywords instead of investing much in short tail keywords. This is simply because although most long tail keywords would only bring a small amount of organic traffic, they definitely have less competition so they are very likely to be ranked on the first page of the search results.

It would be nearly impossible for any small websites to rank well in short keywords, unless they are very well established and popular. So an effective search engine optimisation strategy here is to target as much long tail keywords as possible so you can get lots of easy traffic.

Another great benefit of using long tail keywords is that they can bring more targeted traffics to your website thus there are higher chances of them converting to sales and ad clicks which means more profits for your business. Visitors who use long search terms means they know exactly what they are looking for and if your website is able to provide what they want, they will end up as sales.

How to Sell a Website and Evaluate Its Value

Websites are generally built for two main purposes, to generate business and to serve people information through its contents. A lot of existing websites that are providing free contents, services and software are also actually making a fair amount of revenue from advertising spaces. However just like any one of us, you might want to step one foot further into a new venture and may just plan to sell off your old website to someone else since you know you probably will not have much time to manage it after all.

You may already have the knowledge you need to create a website for your new business, however selling your current website might just be something fresh to you. Definitely, there are many online brokers out there waiting to be hired to help you sell it, but doing it on your own can just save some of your precious money and it doesn’t really take much time once you get the hang of it. The first thing that you need to do is to gather as much details as possible about your website and use them as your selling points or to determine the market value of your site. The relevance of the domain name and the amount of traffic or visitors it receives are always two of the main factors that catch buyers’ interest.

Evaluating the worth of your website is like judging how well you have performed in the past to improve the quality of your site and how much effort you have put in optimizing it. Every little thing such as your site’s page rank, daily incoming visitors, optimized keywords, age of operation and the potential of earnings will be taken into account.

How well the website is established is a crucial factor that could increase the value of the site. The total selling price can be calculated by summing up the average profit it makes and the cost needed to run the site. Usually the amount can be up to several folds of your total potential earnings from operating the business.

Finally, to talk about the best place to sell a website, you can always look into SitePoint, Flippa and Digital Point forums as these are some of the best marketplaces on the internet with tens to hundreds of people buying and selling websites each day. Consider providing a little bit of help and some useful tips to the new webmaster to help him gain better control of the site.

Search Engine Submission

In earlier times, webmasters may need to submit the URLs of their websites directly to search engines, hoping that their web pages will appear on search results sooner. This is a very common method to promote your site, known as search engine submission. This method is still being used today by a lot of webmasters and there are basically two ways submitting your URLs. You can either choose to submit your entire website via a sitemap file or ping the search engines from time to time whenever there’s an update in your site.

However, search engine submission is not really a necessary step for all the websites out there. This is all because of the major search engines that we are using today have developed crawlers or what webmasters named as spiders to discover almost everything automatically and list them up on the search results. Submission is needed only when a website is totally new and has zero back-link, thus a slim chance that the spider can find them.

Even if this is the case, submitting only the address of your homepage is enough to let the spiders to crawl through, provided that the site has been finely optimized and is well structured. In spite of that, webmasters should not simply submit their websites to any automatic search engine submission services since it might violate the major search engines’ terms of services. In the worst case scenario, your site might even be banned from searches.

On the other hand, if you are working on some other SEO efforts such as building back-links, blogging or have even hired trusted search engine optimisation services, just stay patient and they will be fine. Under the condition that all the techniques are white hat, your site will improve its ranking from day to day. When your website has reached its position in the first page of search queries, it is usually considered to be the most favorable outcome.