This is a guest post by Susan Fleming of Electronic Marketing Success.

If you have an Internet presence at all, you have probably heard of keywords. They are the words or phrases someone types into a search engine like Google to find something. Here are some examples:

* resume
* life coach
* dog training
* chiropractor
* credit cards

The keywords you just read are very general, return millions of responses, and are very competitive. If you want your website to get found, particularly if you a smaller operation, you need to find better keywords.

The secret often lies in “The Long Tail” keywords. A long tail keyword is one that is a logical extension of the main keyword, but with more detail.

The theory is that even though these more focused phrases don’t have as much traffic by themselves, that if you use enough of them, you will get a larger amount of traffic than you would if you used the main keyword because of the competition.

Some long tail keywords use the primary phrase, and some don’t. For example, “credit cards for people with bad credit,” IT Professional sample resume,” or “balancing life and work.”

The key is to figure out what problem people are trying to solve that matches what you offer. You can do a little research and discover what long tail terms are being used and how many searches they are generating, and then go after those.

The benefits to using long tail keywords is that they are much easier to rank for (which means more traffic), and the traffic you get will be highly focused.

The bottom line? More conversions… more $$!

If you need help identifying “The Long Tail” for your business, or just want more information, get in touch and we can talk about it.

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Susan Fleming rescues coaches who are being held hostage by the demands of their online marketing efforts. As a Certified Internet Marketing VA, teacher, corporate trainer, writer, public speaker and technophile, Susan has a unique skill set that helps her breathe new life and encouragement into flagging marketing efforts.

If Google Analytics, keyword research, HTML and meta tags give you a headache, relief is just a click away at Electronic Marketing Success.