What the heck is a long tail keyword … and why should you care, right? Internet users, like you and me, type a word or phrase into a search engine, like Google or Yahoo!, and these are generally referred to as keywords. A “long tail” keyword indicates that the searcher typed in a phrase – not just one word, but maybe half a dozen words to search for.

In order for you, the website owner, to have your page show up first in the search results, you need to have those words strategically place on your web site. However, there is a lot of competition for the most common keywords on any given topic – the most common keywords are on so many sites that it’s hard for any one site to pop up first on search engine results.

The good news is that if you begin to focus on the longer, more descriptive terms – a.k.a. long tail keywords – you can achieve some great results because these longer phrases account for 94.3% of website traffic! For example, if you focus on the keyword “books,” you’ll have a very difficult time competing with Amazon.com. If you change the focus of your pages to “books for preschoolers” or “books about curing depression,” you have a far better chance to placing highly on search results.

Chance are that your site is already set up to optimize pages by the title of the page. So, consider your titles carefully – can you add more description to your blog post title? Subject of your forum post? Name of products in your store? Category or tag names in your store or blog? If you get stuck, you can start typing your keyword in Google, and then choose a name from the list of search suggestions that Google gives you.

Why Long Tail Keyword are so valuable. Source: www.wordtracker.com