What are long tail keywords ?

[megaman]

Yes you've guessed it I'm a newbie to seo, and although I know the context in which keywords are used, I still have no idea what the hell long tail keywords are ? I mean when I think about tails I start thinking about animals....

Anyway what are they and why do people on SEO forums love talking about them ?

[WendyK]

I actually haven't heard of the term either I think it's maybe a keyword that is spammed in meta tags for a site?  There's too much jаrgon to follow tbh

[naughtymonkey]

I was wondering the same thing myself so I did a quick search on yahoo and here's a couple links off page one that I found pretty Informative regarding longtail keywords.

Search term I used: What are longtail keywords

Sample Result:

wordstream.com/blog/ws/08/03/09/long-tail-guide

findandconvert.com/blog/tag/long-tail-keywords

findandconvert.com/blog/podpress_trac/web/97/0/FnC-longtail-sk.mp3

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search.yahoo.com/search?p=What+are+long+tail+keywords&ei=UTF-8&fr=hp-pvdt

Hope that helps.

[jean12]

Long tail keywords are different from the normal words.

Example: how to apply for a credit card online

compared to: credit cards

the problem is the search terms like credit cards a highly competitive and not easy to target.

[samg]

People love talking about them because they are easier to rank for. If you could rank for a particular keyword and get traffic for that you would try to go for that one. Am I right? That 's why people love talking about it.

[amomswish]

So, if I want to target just people that are looking to apply for a credit card online, that would be the long tail keyword I would want to use in Adwords?

[welshboy]

I think the word long tail kind of confuses the matter I think the whole term simply means keywords that people search for that are longer than 1-2 words.

Like instead of "Mountain Bike"

People might also search for a longer term like

"Blue Mountain Bike With Rear Suspension"

So it's basically just a keyword but  a longer one! and one that's not searched as highly as the shorter ones, hence lower competition.

[RichardSmith]

 Hello Friends,

Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three, and some times as many as five words in the phrase. Long tail keywords are used when the website wants to refine search terms to the web page, as well as when the searcher is looking for something rather specific. Like normal keywords, long tail keywords are used to define what is on the web page and what the publisher wants to be found under in search engines and on search engine results pages.

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reputationhead.com

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[David_Thomas]

Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three or some times more than three words in the phrase. It mostly used to get ranking in short period of time. These keywords are highly specific & draw less traffic for the website, but tend to draw more quality traffic.

[RH-Calvin]

Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are used to rank your website faster in search engines. These keywords usually have less number of searches and are used to quickly rank your website.