Should You Use Geographic Long Tail Keywords in Article Titles?
I write a blog dedicated to people in the Home Staging Industry, advising them how best to use the internet to market their businesses. I noticed something lately about how some of them were using article marketing that applies across all markets for locally based businesses.
I have long preached about the power of what I call geographical long tail keywords.
When you are setting up your web pages for your home staging business or any other locally based business for that matter, you want your page text and the invisible meta tags behind your page to include the key geographical keyword terms appropriate for your market.
This helps the search engine know that your site is and should be shown to people in your area, and will help get your web page to the top of the search engine results for people doing a search in your community.
In smaller markets this alone, when done properly will get you to the first page of results. However, in most markets you need to go beyond this.
You need to generate backlinks to your site.
One of my favorite ways to do so is through article writing. I encourage you to create short meaningful articles and post them to article directories. Perhaps the most important of which is www.ezinearticles.com
I recently checked them for articles on Homestaging and noted several that included geographical references in their titles. There’s something good and bad to be said about that idea.
The good first. Article Directories like ezinearticles have high page ranks on their own. An article that includes your town name and home staging in it may well show up on the search engines by itself.
Being a published author online in a Google Search will certainly aid in your perceived credibility in the eyes of the reader, which is certainly good.
The downside is that far fewer newsletter, blog or ezine editors are likely to use the article. For example in one article the author’s title was: 5 ways to homestage PEI (Prince Edward Island) real estate. Since it mentions PEI, its not likely a California or Florida or Australian site on homestaging or realestate is likely to repost it.
People who reprint articles from these directories are not allowed to edit them, and thus most will just pass them by.
It’s important to understand that the widespread reposting is the primary goal of article marketing. For each republishing of your article counts in your total backlink tally. The reason to write articles is to gain this backlink power to raise your ranking on the search engines. And that would be my focus, so I would tend to say do not put geopraphy in your article titles.
That said, if you have a number of good articles written, it may be worth an experiment to see if you can’t get some of them ranked.
Now what I did like about the article was that the author did create anchor text linking his site to the term “PEI real estate.” This will help him rank higher in anyone’s search for that term. And that is what article marketing is all about from a local business perspective.
Technorati Tags: article marketing, backlinks, geographical keywords, long tail keywords, seo, search engine ranking
Doug Champigny
Lonnie Minton
Luca Di Nicola
Joel Osborne
Brett McEllhiney
Fred Lotgering
