Understanding the difference in broad and exact phrase match as well as long-tail keywords is very important for anyone building or optimizing a website. By understanding these terms, site builders can get a lot more traffic and have a considerably greater success with their sites.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are strings of words used in searches. For example, someone looking for specific information on changing a battery on an iPod might use the phrase “how to change a battery on an iPod” rather than just words like “iPod” or “iPod battery.” This fact can be very useful for those starting new websites as will be explained later.
Exact and broad phrase match
Keyword research tools will usually give both broad and exact phrase matches. Broad match in web searches are those results returned when people search by more general words and shorter phrases. They also can be seen when search engines deliver results based more on what sites are popular than what the exact phrase searched for was.
Exact phrase match occurs when search engines deliver homepages with phrases that exactly match what the person searching typed in. This is important for two reasons:
- The traffic from such searches is more targeted. Thus, the person searching is likely to stay on the site for longer and utilize its services.
- It is much easier to rank higher in the search engines for these long-term keywords than more broad searches.
New sites and long-tail keywords
Newer and smaller sites usually have little chance of getting traffic from broad match search results. These results heavily favor established sites with a lot of content, links and traffic. However, it is a much different story with long-tail keywords and exact phrase matches. When a site is optimized for these keyword phrases and has links containing them in anchor text, it has a good chance of outranking much more established sites in those exact match searches.
There are a much greater number of broad match searches and results than exact match. However, exact match can still provide good traffic depending on the keywords. Therefore, the best strategy usually centers on first concentrating on the long-tail keywords. In time, as the site becomes more established with more links, content, traffic and page rank, it will start to receive more of the broad match traffic too.
For example, the site optimized with long-tail keyword phrases such as changing batteries on an iPod might gradually move up in the search engines and eventually rank for more general terms and phrases related to iPods.
The user experience
For any site to become popular, it has to deliver value to the users. It is unlikely a site based entirely on long-tail keywords can do this very effectively. For this reason, and to make building the site more interesting, it is advisable to create at least some content based around what is useful and informative in the niche and not necessarily with any keywords in mind. This kind of content will help bring users back and bring in the natural linking that is so important for a site to really move up in search engine rankings.
Long-tail keywords, broad and exact matches as well as the user experience all come together for a successful website. Be sure to understand them thoroughly before building a site.
