Choosing your keywords - a bite of a giant cake or a cookie for yourself

SEO starts with choosing keywords. Most SEO people will run up front with their SEO verbiage such as “we will combine long tail keywords and short tail keywords”… What the heck does it mean?
If you ask the difference, they all will say something like this: “A keyword is by definition one word so it is short tail; when you associate keywords into keyphrases, then we talk about long tail”…
Mmmm, this is interesting but how to put this back into a understandable context?

Let’s say you sell red snickers with blue laces.
A short tail keyword would be “shoes” - in the best situation ever, you are top 1, every one looking for shoes will land on your website - yoohoo, traffic jack-pot. Unfortunately, 70% did not snickers, 25% did not want red ones and 3% thought the blue laces suck… You are left with 2%, a bite from a giant market cake.

A long tell keyword would be “red snickers blue laces” - in the best situation ever, you are also top 1, every one looking for red snickers with blue laces will land on your website - not so yoohoo because the traffic sucks. No it is very good because the traffic will be very relevant and you will sell to 99% of them - yoohoo, optimal conversion rate. You may have a cookie but you share it with no one!

Now you really know what is the good, the bad and the evil with keywords!

No, it does not. Seo starts with a business plan, leading to a marketing plan, leading to a structured website offering lots of useful information in an easily accessible format with a logical structure.
Then you use keywords to fine tune it.

I am afraid even your business plan and strategy take place on the back of keywords you target, isn’t it?

[font=verdana]Nope. First you decide what your site is going to do, who it is targeting, what the business plan for it is, how you are going to make money out of it or what other benefit you want from it, then you start to think about what keywords you need to promote in order to realise that goal.

Choosing keywords before you have a business plan is the ultimate in putting the cart before the horse, and having the tail wag the dog. The keywords you target are a result of your content, not the cause of it.[/font]

yet another fine example of seo people blowing smoke out of various orifices

please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

I dont agree with this. I dont think anyone would start a business or an website just for SEO. As you all know SEO is just a marketing technique, which every business owner would think of either before or after starting a business. Ultimately, SEO comes to play once the website and all the processes are ready and set to go. So, no one would start with SEO and then get their business idea and marketing plans and structured website.

As Pallavi mentioned, I do agree that in most of the cases long tail keywords work. When I say “work” I mean the Lead-Deal conversion.

I believe that people who search are no more broad minded. They know what they are searching for and to be precise they even know the specifications. When people who search with specifications or detailed phrases land on your website, your chances of getting him as a prospect or lead is high.

SEO is planned for business and business are not planned for SEO. Moreover, there are thousands of websites that are ranked better for many keywords even without doing SEO, just because of the quality and old content they have got. So, do you mean that those businesses or websites started only after they had a though on SEO?

Most certainly not. A company decides to import bike tyres from “muliti colour tyres” and sell them here because nobody imports them at the moment. They don’t decide to set up a company called “multi colour tyres Uk”, set up a website called multicolurtyresdotcodotuk and then find a product to match it.