Search Engine Optimization Software, Free SEO software

Long tail keywords
If you had your choice of visitor traffic originating from the search engines, which
scenario would your choose?
?  One thousand visitors from one keyword?
 
or
?  One thousands visitors from one thousand keywords?
 
If you can't easily decide, you are not alone. The SEO community seems to be split
on this issues as well. It's hard to decide, given the fact that targeting a few very
popular keywords could bring to your site thousands of visitors a day, but at the
same time you would be facing some very stiff competition. The more popular a
keyword phrase is, the more optimization and link building effort is needed to
achieve top ranking. So there is a trade off between choosing less competitive
phrases with lower traffic vs. more popular keywords with higher difficulty levels to
attain top ranking. 
Some SEOs prefer to target a few very popular keywords to get the greatest bulk
of their traffic while others prefer to focus on many low competition keywords for
an almost guaranteed top ranking. Also most SEOs recommend webmasters new
Spoon-Fed SEO for GrownUps
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to search engine optimization to target Long Tail keywords because it's easier to
rank well in a short period of time. 
So lets examine first what the Long Tail keyword phrases are all about and how
they can drive targeted visitors to your site. Webmasters with a single focus on a
dozen popular keywords may miss a very big chuck of traffic from obscure low
competition phrases. The Long Tail keywords may be only searched a few times a
month, but given a few hundred of these keywords, they can deliver a decent
amount of highly targeted traffic. The main advantage of Long Tail keywords is
that it's very easy to attain high ranking for them. When you are just starting out
it can be a great confidence booster to see the first few visitors trickle in from the
search engines using Long Tail keywords. 
The Long Tail phrases have a very tight focus, which makes them more targeted
than highly popular broad keyword phrases and usually convert better. For
example the keyword "golf shoes" might bring in thousands of visitors a day to a
website specializing in golf shoes, but if someone searching for a specific brand
and model like "men's air accel classic golf shoes" there is a higher chance of sale
resulting from the search. 
How do you discover Long Tail keyword phrases for your
own site?
Most of the mainstream keyword research tools such as the free Google external
keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze
are a good place to start, but you also have to find some other not so obvious
ways to search for Long Tail keywords. The SEOdigger.com keyword spying tool is
definitely a must have tool. You can also try Google suggest. This free Google tool
tries to guess what your searching for and gives you suggestions in the form of an
auto-complete search box. 
Another great way to discover Long Tail keywords is to collect site search query
data directly from your visitors. A site search tool consists of a web form and a
small database of all the site URLs and their content. When the user types a query
into the search box the program saves the query in the database. This is a true
gold mine of Long Tail keyword phrases coming directly from your website visitors.
We have been using the Zoom Site Indexer, a very inexpensive MS Windows
based site indexing and search tool on our own site and several SEO client sites, it
works really well.
Conclusion
Selecting the best search terms is the first and most important step in optimizing your
website. The keyword selection process could be defined as the art of expanding and the
science of narrowing your keyword list down to the most relevant keyword terms that bring
targeted visitors to your site. If you want to grow the number of visitors to your site month
after month, you need to continue searching for new keywords within your website's topic
relentlessly. Once you have exhausted the conventional keyword research tools and ideas
online, start looking at magazines, newspapers, trade publications, consumer advocacy
publications and even your junk mail folder.