Increase Google Traffic: Long Tail Content Techniques - Building the Right SEO Strategy

The first thing you should have: authority and trust for your website

Think of powerful, authority and trusted backlinks coming from related websites as water pressure entering the main pipe. Your main pipe is your home page, and the inner pipes are the internal links pointing to inner pages.

This means that the primary driving force to rank inner pages (for long tail traffic optimization) is to first get powerful links pointing to your home page. There are two reasons for this. First, the link authority will spread to the inner pages, increasing "pressure," which means your inner pages will rank faster, even without links from other domains pointing to them. (Remember, the home page links to your inner pages).

Second, if you manage to rank the home page keywords pretty well, it is a sign that you have managed to get the authority you need to power up the rest of your inner pages.

So how you find powerful backlinks that can push inner pages to rank?

• Get them from the same niche as your website. If your website is all about SEO, then get them from SEO Chat, Seomoz, Searchenginewatch or even Matt Cutts' blog.
  
• Make sure you have great content to attract links. Generate some level of curiosity among readers of those sites, and they might end up linking to you.
  
• You can also be proactive by visiting those websites first, and then try to make friends with the people on (and behind) them. Lots of techniques will do; commenting, helping them in forums, helping other users, etc, can attract some attention to you and to your website.

Adding new content periodically

Most websites looking for SEO help, whether they're business websites or simply bloggers on the Internet, are sometimes very lazy about adding content periodically. This is also true for e-commerce websites.

If you examine the data I presented earlier,, the more content on your website, the higher the chance the search engines will index, pick up those keywords and then return that page as a search result of a query for you to get long tail traffic.

This means you should be adding content periodically. As to how much and how often, that's up to you. The recommendation given most is to add one post per day at around 450 to 500 words, if you really have the time and dedication to work on your website or blog.

This content should all be original, helpful, interesting. Specifically, there are three points that are the most recommended specifications.

First, each post should be around  450-500 words of content.

Second, the title tag should be around 60- 68 characters so that it will look descriptive and accurate. So for example, instead of using “Cheap Widgets,” you should use “Cheap Widgets: 45 inches Codex Model New with 50% Discount.”

Tip: The longer your title tag (with the correct mixture of targeted and important keywords), the higher the page will rank in search engines, due to higher chances of relevance matching.

Third, add some pictures to make the content more interesting. Videos are also recommended. Make sure you have the rights to publish or use the pictures and videos.

To research good keywords to target, as well as researching ideas for writing content, you can use Google's keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

It is recommended that you target easier keywords, such as those keywords which appear to be specific but with less exact match traffic (< 100 per month for example), because they will tend to rank more easily than competitive ones.

You should then include the targeted keywords found in the Google keyword tool in the inner page title tag. For more details about the new Google keyword tool, you can read this tutorial: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Choosing-Keywords-Help/The-Google-Keyword-Tool-a-Closer-Look/

Linking to related content internally

Now that you have well-placed content and title tags, you should link that content to related pages in your website as well. These links will help spread link juices to related content, thus helping them to rank better in the search engines.

This is the same concept as getting inbound links from external domains pointing to your website. You can also apply this concept to your internal pages, linking related pages to each other using the title tag as the anchor text.

If you are using WordPress, you can use the “Yet Another Related Post” Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/). This works by analyzing a specific inner page's content, and then presenting a list of related posts containing links to related inner pages.

Take advantage of the internal linking strategy to help spread the link juice you have earned from other websites. A good example is Wikipedia.org; if you visit a certain Wikipedia result from Google search, you will notice that the Wikipedia article contains links pointing to related pages within their website.

Prevent duplicate content on your inner pages

The last but still very important strategy is to prevent duplicate content issues on your inner pages. It is recommended that you read the following tutorial for more details on duplicate content detection and prevention: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Duplicate-Content-in-SEO-Detection-and-Prevention-Techniques/

This will let Google properly rank canonical pages, and make the search engine bots crawl your website more efficiently.

So what are the overall benefits? Since Google makes it easy to rank the inner pages of your website, when the long tail traffic starts to pick up, your website will become stronger because some of your website readers might link to one of your inner pages (coming from forums, related blogs and websites for example), thus helping to improve your website's overall link profile.