Be Your Own Long Tail Keywords Research Tool

Long tail keyword tools are essential for small web entrepreneurs. You cannot compete for the most searched keywords -- by now they have insurmountable competition. You must put together collections of micro niches which you can dominate. Each niche needs keywords by which people can find it. You need to do long tail keyword research to find those niches of low-competition keywords.

You need to find a large number of keywords, the number of searches for them per day or month, and the amount of competition for the keywords. The competition, at minimum, consists of all those web pages containing the keyword. More detailed information would include the number of pages optimized for the keyword. You can get all this information for free on the web, from Google; although, there is software available that automates the process for you.

As a long tail keyword finder, you can use the Google keyword selector tool , which suggests many low competition / low search volume keywords. You will find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You type in a keyword (or several). It will suggest related keywords and give you a spread sheet of those keywords, their search frequencies, and other information. You can download the spreadsheet.

Remove from the spreadsheet the irrelevant phrases. Sort the remaining keywords by decreasing search frequency. Set aside those keywords with too few searches, perhaps less than 210 searches per month (7 per day).

If you wish, you can reserve those keywords with too few searches to sprinkle into ezine articles. Keywords with low competition may bring the article to page one of a search engine's results.

Next you use the Google search page. It is not usually thought of as a long tail keywords tool, but you use it for two competition searches. Do a Google search for the keyword in quotes to find the number of pages containing those keywords as a phrase, that is, adjacent to each other. The first page of the results gives an estimate of the number of pages containing the phrase. Do not search without quotes -- that counts all pages containing all the words in the keyword phrase even if they are not close on the page.

You can cut the keywords with too many exact matches from your list. Your pages will be lost in the clutter if you try to compete for them. What's too many? Everybody has their own limit, but I have heard recommendations of somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000.

Next, find the number of pages optimized for the keyword. A page is optimized for a keyword if the keyword is the keyword is in the page title, contained in the URL of the page, and the keyword is in the anchor text of links to the page. Again, you can do this step of long tail keyword research by another Google search.

You tell Google to return the pages with these optimizations by searching for intitle:"keyword", inurl:"keyword", and inanchor:"keyword". Delete the keywords with too many competing, optimized pages, more than 50 or 100, say. (You can find information on advanced Google query operators at http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/operators.html )

Pages simultaneously optimized for the keyword in title, URL, and anchor text indicate that someone is intentionally trying to compete for the keyword.

If you are intending to sell products or services to the people searching with these keywords, you may want to check the estimates of their "online commercial intention" (OCI). You can get those estimates at http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/ It will give you a fraction between zero -- the search seems to have NO commercial intent -- and one -- the search does seem to have a commercial intent. The numeric value indicates a kind of confidence level, not a fraction of searches that have the intent. In experiments, the non-commercial keywords averaged about a 0.2 value, and the commercial keywords averaged about 0.83. Fractions near 0.5 had a high rate of incorrect classifications. If you intend to sell, you can cut off those keywords with an OCI less than 0.6 or 0.7. There are, however, questions about the methodology and assumptions used in the construction of this tool.

You can do long tail keyword research for free by using the Google keyword selector tool, a Google search, and optionally the MSN online commercial intention page.