Chasing the Long Tail of Vacation Rental Keyword Research

I’ve been doing some research this morning on long tailed keywords and how they impact traffic to vacation rental sites, for an article/ebook I’m writing for Renting For Profit. In the course of checking out material related to this I found a ton of resources on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (which is a web site – not a book). This is a membership site but if you are not prepared to spend the $300 per month to subscribe to the training modules, the free stuff on the site is enough to get you going on your own search engine optimization.

Sign up for SEO Book and you can download Firefox extensions, and a Rank Checker with associated video tutorials; there’s also a very useful Keyword Suggestion Tool.

You could also check out a long list of SEO tools here

Don’t forget there is a wealth of information on keyword research on Google as well. This will take you to the Google Ads page but you don’t have to sign up to do Ads – just use the tools to help find some hotly searched keywords. Given 70% of searches are long tail rather than more obvious terms, this is worth the effort.

For example, I was using the keyword ‘geocaching’ to drill down and find phrases to use on a new page I am putting on my cottage web site. The suggestion tool came up with ‘what is geocaching’ as a phrase that gets a lot of search demand but has relatively fewer sites delivering relevant information. This means that titling the page, “What is Geocaching?” may attract more targeted visitors.

If you have some time over the holidays to learn some new skills, getting to grips with basic SEO may be a profitable idea. I’m planning on some new pages for my web site and will be making sure they are optimized, and will be found by Google. If you haven’t the faintest idea of what I’m talking about, it may be worthwhile to kick start 2012 with a bit of new learning.

Photo by Beggs on Flickr