A good point between long and short tail keywords is that long tail keywords often get alot less search results in Google and that way you would have alot less competetion, and thus more likely to get more visits. I’ll give an example: Search for “Blogging Tips” and see how many results it gives (near 2 million). Compare that to “Blogging Tips for Beginners” which results in merely 600.000 results. Ofcourse this is still a huge amount, but much easier to rank higher if you focus most of your related post on those keywords, this also results into higher conversions.

Plugin

Using the All-In-One SEO plugin for Wordpress, is making it rather easy to manage the keywords, descriptions, titles of each post, making them more Search Engine friendly.

Statistics

I made a graph which explains the correlation (connection) between the monthly searches (Y) for specific keywords and the amount (X) of them. As you can see the amount of keywords as they increase, will also decrease the monthly searches for those keywords. Many SEO Experts will tell you to focus on 3 to 4+ keywords since competing with established websites whom are using 2 keywords will be hard.

What should you do?

So what we did on DuoBlogger lately is looking into Google Analytics and find the keywords which people are using to reach our blog. We searched through some of the recent days and it looked like we had some visits on these keywords:All the other days looked fairly the same for those keywords. Typing that keyword in Google gave me the result which lead to: Must Have PC Software For Bloggers. So to make this more SEO friendly, we would have to rename the title, description and keywords for the post. As you can see we now named it: Top Blogger Apps. Which should, after reindexing by Google rank up in page 1 in the SERP’s. (If the keywords don’t have much competition you don’t even need that many backlinks to that sub-page, you simply do your on-page optimization like changing the page title then get it indexed then it will start to rank.)

Short Vs. Long Tail Keywords

So you should question yourself if you should focus on short tail or long tail keywords. It all depends on the niche you are in.

You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds of keywords which bring only small traffic. Well the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic (note: only a handfull, not that much, but it’s targetted traffic). Not everybody is capable of ranking high for highly competitive keywords but anybody can rank for long tail keywords. 

Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Priced Computers’ whatever, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them, and thus generating sales. 

See what other Twitterers focus on

I asked around on Twitter to my followers if they were targetting  long tail or short tailed keywords. Here is the result:

@Rajupp from TechPP said: I use long tail keywords as well as short ones, just to give you an example, I use “Watch online TV Free” and “Online TV” & …

@Hendricius from DuoBlogger said: I focus on short ones and then try to include long term ones in the post. I try using alternatives to the short title.

@PassTheBoll from PassTheBoll said: I try to use relevant keywords. Usually they are single words, but sometimes phrases.

So what do you focus on, long – short – mulitple? Problems ranking high for some keywords? Share it with us.

I am dedicating this article to the internet death-sentence, the worst punishment you can get in terms of SEO….. A ban from Google. I am gonna explain the dangers of a ban, what indicates a ban and then let you know what you can do to get unbanned.

So what are the real dangers of getting banned from Google? There are a couple of them, I am getting most traffic on all my websites from Google. 79 percent of my visitors on my gaming site are in fact coming through Google. Only 6 percent Yahoo and 3 percent MSN. If I would get banned that would mean a dramatical loss of traffic for me. Instead of my 20 000 visitors per day I would be able to expect around 500 at most.

Indicators for a ban

With low traffic you are also of course not earning as much with your advertisements. 90 percent less visitors means 90 percent less money. If you some-how get penalized then it basically means that you can screw your website unless you somehow get unbanned. Let’s assume that you are making a living out of Adsense, did not get any education because your websites were running so well and then suddenly experience a dramatical loss of earnings… That would in no way be productive for you.

What are the factors that lead to a ban?

• Blackhat SEO techniques. Placing hidden text on your website is the most common mistake. Everything that is not white-hat (natural) can be labeled as black hat
• Duplicate content. Copying content from another website will get you banned. If you ever copy content then make sure to include a link to the original source. That method is often used on newspaper websites and consequently okay. But make sure that you also provide good content
• So called door-way pages that are just made to get visitors on to another site. Those wesites usually have a link in every article, Google penalizes that as well. I have once been banned on one of my blogs for making a cloak.blog which I only made to get visitors on my main-blog.
• Spammy website. You are usually labeled as spam if you get a massive amount of backlinks within a short period of time. Stay natural and build up your backlinks slowly. Also don’t over do it with the keyword density of your articles.
• Morally incorrect content: Content like extreme violence or anything else morally incorrect can get you banned as well. If you run a forum then this could be a potential danger – you can not control every user yet you will be penalized for them. Also viruses, spyware or any other badware will get you penalized and banned.
• Automated content. There are some programs that claim that they can write you 100 percent original content per mouse click. That is wrong, in most cases the content is simply copied out of an article directory, thus counting as duplicate content. Automating your content-creation is a good and easy way to get booted.

The indicators of a ban from google are relatively simple. Check Google’s index of your website. IF there are no longer any pages listed then that means that you got banned.

Now if you really got banned, what I don’t hope, then you can use a form to applicate for reinclusion into the search engine. To do so click this link. You are required to enter some details, what you think might have caused the ban, what you changed on your website since then etc. Make sure that you provide as detailed information as possible. Google will most likely not read your application on reinclusion twice. You only have one good chance, so make sure to be as honest as possible.

So what can you do to request a reconsideration of your website? Google has the following in their FAQ:

• First, make sure you’ve added your site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verified site ownership.
• Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools.
• On the Dashboard, under Talk to Google in the list on the right, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.

If you are unsure what you should write then please check out my google reconsideration template.w

For my cloaking blog it took five months to get reincluded. I removed everything google-unfriendly and then reapplied… In fact the long waiting time only shows how little Adsense cares about small websites. I am almost 100 percent sure that they developed algorithms, so that they do not even check the reconsiderations on their own anymore… It will most likely be done by a robot as well. Just make sure you are honest, that’s the best thing you can do.

Wishing your good luck with your application and re inclusion. If you will not get re-included then I can only recommend to make a new website, which is fully compatible with Google’s idea of a perfect website.