Quality Content Breeds Long tail Keywords

As we know Google have recently done another update and several people are reporting changes in their rankings.  I cannot say for definite whether they had been doing any unnatural link building or not, sometimes when Google do an update, good sites are affected and then they are returned to the original place if not better when the dust has settled.

When you consider that good sites are being affected even if it is just temporary you realise that you cannot risk being punished by Google by doing anything slightly fishy. Google want to give people quality content and it is their search results that we want to be ranked in so what is the best way to keep them happy? Create good quality useful content and plenty of it.

There are many benefits to creating quality content, if it is useful then people will share it and promote it for you. They will share it on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook. They will link to it from their own blogs and reference your work creating a natural link network. Google loves natural link networks and they love quality relevant content, none of that spun article rubbish many people use.

So, if you write a proper post of 1000 words or more what happens? You naturally create long tail keyword phrases that are relevant to the post subject. You cannot help but write sentences that will develop into and include long tail keywords that you can be ranked for.

Imagine you wanted to rank for the keyword phrase ‘Ice Cream Parlour’, while writing the post you can easily have sentences that have ‘the best ice cream parlour’ ‘the best ice cream parlour in Lincolnshire’ ‘the best tasting ice cream’ etc. All of these phrases could be searched for and you can become ranked for these if the article you write is of a serious and informative nature unlike the spun articles people use.

If you have other articles on your site that match the content and other people share your posts and reference them with connecting links you could easily find yourself ranked in Google for keyword phrases you didn’t expect. Sometimes keyword research can throw up keyword combinations that when added together in an article can be hard to understand. Writing a proper post will generate proper good relevant keywords that Google will love.

I remember writing an article about people having a certain type of mindset and I used a man I called ‘Ibiza Bob’ as my example. The article was about people wanting to do something but instead of doing anything about it they sit around and moan. Ibiza Bob always wanted to go to Ibiza but couldn’t afford it, he blamed the Government and the economy as the reason as why he could never afford to go yet he spent most nights down the local bar, drinking smoking and having a kebab on the way home.

For 20 years or more he wanted to go to Ibiza and for those 20 years he spent his money on beer, cigarettes and food, if he really wanted he could have stayed in 1 or 2 nights a week over a year or two and have enough money to go to Ibiza for a long enjoyable holiday… but he didn’t.

After I wrote the post I notice that I was getting traffic for keywords like ‘the story of Ibiza’, I was on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase for quite some time. The people searching were not really my targeted audience but they were coming and I was ranked. The actual post had very little to do with ‘the story of Ibiza’ but Google rewarded me without my intention.

What happened was that I spent time to write a long quality post which generated a series of natural links which were being picked up and ranked by Google. I was not in any way trying to manipulate Google by engaging in keyword stuffing or article spinning. I was just writing about a topic that I was interested in and knew about.

Obviously I wrote a follow up post that talked about my findings and reinforced the keywords, this time the post included the keyword phrases that Google had ranked me for which were not originally planned keywords in the first post.  Again this was a long written piece from the heart and mind and not designed to have keywords stuffed into it.

Keywords and Google have a natural tendency to attract each other and if they are generated naturally in a long well written piece then they will have more power. With Google’s recent updates they are looking for the relevance and quality and that is what your articles will give them.

Now we are not saying do not do any keyword research or include relevant keywords that your research gives you, far from it, I want to get across that you will generate good quality keywords when you write a proper full article, keywords that Google will pick up on.

Sometimes you should not fear or worry about your articles having or not having keywords in them, the main thing you should concentrate on is to create good quality useful articles and plenty of them. Patrick Meninga did keyword research, when he had his chosen keywords he went to work creating loads of articles that he placed on his site and shared with other sites as guest posts.

These articles were connected passing relevance to each other and when he had finished he was ranking for more keywords than he had planned. He wrote the posts himself, they were not spun nor were they outsourced on the cheap, they were written from the heart as he knew the subject matter well. As he wrote the articles the long tail keyword phrases wrote themselves.

It is natural and cannot be avoided, that is the beautiful thing about the English language, well any language really, whatever it is you are writing about, the subject matter cannot be described without creating other good natural keyword phrases. Go and give it a try, write something big and useful about any topic and then look at the keywords that are formed. You might be surprised at how keyword rich your articles can become naturally.